


on the very verge

by attheborder



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Anal Sex, Comedy, Consensual Possession, Dubious Consent, F/M, First Kiss, Ghost Hunters, Ghost Sex, Ghost Sexual Harassment, Ghosts, M/M, Masturbation, Oral Sex, Secular Exorcisms, Spiritual Subterfuge, Trashbag Flatmates, minor character cameos, pop culture references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-09-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:42:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 39,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25796071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/attheborder/pseuds/attheborder
Summary: When uptight programmer John Irving moves into a dilapidated London flat with his best friends, he's just happy to be paying below market rate for rent. However, he'd failed to account for a few unexpected elements. Such as Ned's obnoxious childhood friend, Solomon Tozer, crashing on the sofa indefinitely. And, of course, the ghost of a long-dead madman named Cornelius Hickey, who's bent on making John's life a living hell...ORThe Haunting of John Irving: A Sex Comedy in Four Actsfeaturingsome Hapless Flatmates - an Unwelcome Houseguest - a few Dead Victorians - a Devious Seduction - much Scheming, Plotting, & Carrying-On - a Pair of Competent Ghost Hunters - various & sundry Erotic Revelations, of a Personal Nature - and, by certain standards, a Happy Ending.
Relationships: Cornelius Hickey/Lt John Irving, Cornelius Hickey/Sgt Solomon Tozer, Harry D. S. Goodsir/Lady Silence | Silna, Lt John Irving/Sgt Solomon Tozer, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 149
Kudos: 98





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to the estimable [ktula](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ktula/pseuds/ktula) for the beta!

The place was cheap, which was the important thing. John was still unclear as to where exactly George had managed to find such a spot on short notice, but neither he nor Ned had much luxury to quibble: the speed at which their former abode was condemned after an infestation of rats revealed a larger asbestos problem meant they didn’t really have the luxury of choice.

It was fucking massive for the price, ideally located, equidistant from Ned’s office and George’s campus, fully furnished, and with an expansive, untamed backyard garden. 

George struggled with the old-fashioned key in the lock for a moment before the heavy blue door swung open, revealing a shabby entryway, and the large front room beyond it. 

Ned dragged his suitcases in first, and looked around at the peeling sideboards, the sagging sofa, the dirty windows. “Well, it’s all a bit Young Ones, isn’t it?” he said. 

“You’re right,” George said, joining Ned, poking at the grimy carpet with the tip of his oxford. “Like at any moment the whole place could be crushed by a—”

“—a giant sandwich!” Ned finished with an exultant cry, and they both exploded into laughter and a babble of incomprehensible quotations and references.

John stood silent on the threshold until the two of them quieted abruptly and swung simultaneous guilty looks right at him. 

“Right,” said Ned slowly. 

“No telly growing up,” said George, recalling out loud. 

“You know, John,” Ned said, “I think they’re all on YouTube now, we can watch them with you, it’d be a laugh—”

“It’s fine,” said John. “I’m not really interested.” 

John was used to this kind of gentle badgering from his mates: his cloistered upbringing left him vulnerable to assaults from all corners on the basis of pop-cultural ignorance. He knew they didn’t mean anything by it.

George took the bedroom on the first floor, the one that was probably meant to be an office or a library, back when the flat was occupied by the ideal Victorian family, mum-dad-kids-cook-maid as the Queen herself intended. “Look at these built in bookshelves!” he’d cried, in ecstasies—and so that left Ned and John to the two upstairs. They lugged their suitcases up in tandem and flipped a coin to determine who would get the one with the ensuite; Ned didn’t even bat an eye when he came out the loser, being a chronic sufferer of misfortune since birth.

“Better luck next time,” John said with a grin.

“You know it won’t be,” sighed Ned, and decamped for his inferior quarters.

John’s new room was a fair bit bigger than his old one, with larger windows and a beautiful view out of them, of the overgrown front garden and beyond it, the quiet street, lined with tall trees shivering bare in the January cold. He tested the mattress, found it perfectly adequate; the bathroom cramped but serviceable.

After dropping his bags, he wandered back down to the front room, and admired the sturdy furniture the place had come with. It was well-built pre-war stuff, probably as old as John’s grandfather, more than a bit scratched up at this point but still solid and standing proud. Clearly they’d made the right choice leaving their cheap IKEA particleboard junk behind. 

There was even an old television, the kind Ned or George might have had growing up, squat and bulbous like some kind of alien creature crouching on its haunches. Ned would want to get it replaced with something flat and fancy, probably, or at least he’d state his desire to, and then fail to find the spare time to do so for months on end. 

As John considered this, the television suddenly switched itself on, and began rapidly flipping through channels. 

Frames flashed dizzily on its glass: bugs crawling, puppets dancing, knives chopping, icebergs calving, wrestlers fighting, a close up of a passionate kiss.

“Hm,” John said. He went to switch it off, fiddling with the sticky buttons on the front of the ancient console, but nothing seemed to work. If anything his efforts made it worse: the volume shot up, and the zapping between channels increased in frequency until the blinding glimpses began to blur and shift and melt, creating terrifying half-images, unnatural fusions—

John crouched down and sharply yanked the plug out of the wall. 

The cacophony ceased instantly with a noise like a sizzling gulp, the light on its screen collapsing in on itself and leaving only a tiny glowing dot that quickly faded.

He shivered, sighed, and then realized that it was much colder in the house than he’d thought. His breath gusted in front of his face, a cloud of gray mist that obscured his reflection in the screen in front of him.

  
  


❧❧❧

John looked up from his laptop to find that George had set his textbook and notes down on the coffee table, and was now frowning at the ceiling. 

He tugged his headphones off— they were the fancy noise-cancelling type, he couldn’t program without them— and said, “Sorry?”

“I said, did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“There was a sound, from upstairs—a knocking. Like something heavy falling over.” 

John found this hard to believe. There was nothing  _ to  _ fall over upstairs, not in his room nor Ned’s, both still bare as prison cells less than a week after moving in. He shook his head. “Didn’t hear.”

George frowned, but no sooner had he returned to his studies than he leapt up, in that fragile way of his that always reminded John of a very elderly cat. He peered up at the ceiling and began swiveling his head back and forth like a radar dish. “There! There it is again!” 

“It’s the ice, George,” said John authoritatively. “Freezing in the pipes. This is a very old building, and it’s the middle of winter. You’re going to hear odd things, it’s totally normal.” 

George settled back down with his book, though the suspicious expression remained on his pointed face, and John returned to his database. If he finished with his day’s work early—and it was looking like he would, this project had ended up being far simpler than he’d expected overall—he could spend the rest of the afternoon essentially getting paid to play Hearthstone, which was ideal.

He’d not gotten another ten lines of code in before George jumped up again. “There it is!” he cried, and bounded upstairs, hell-bent on investigation.

John was left staring at George’s abandoned book. It was a thick, old tome, one of George’s precious research texts, stuck through with multicolored post-its galore according to his arcane system of notation. 

Then, before John’s eyes, the pages of the book began to turn, as if caught by a breeze: slow at first, and then faster, and faster. John looked about for where the wind was coming from but could see no open window anywhere in the room—and by the time he looked back, the pages had fallen still, landing on a chapter headed  _ Homeopathic Magic Of A Flesh Diet. _

Only moments later, George’s footsteps began their approach down the stairs, and the wind started up again. The book was back at George’s original chapter,  _ The Perils Of The Soul,  _ before he made it back to the table. 

“There was nothing,” said George, sliding back into his seat. “Nothing that I could see. Must be the pipes, like you said…are you okay, John?” 

“Yeah,” said John, putting his headphones back on. “Just have to get back to work, is all.” 

  
  


❧❧❧

John “Early Riser” Irving, they used to call him, back at school. Well, that among other things, but the other names he didn’t much care to recall. Getting up early, though, he could and did take pride in, treasuring the quiet mornings with only his tea and the newspaper for company. 

The sun had only barely risen when he ambled downstairs, humming a half-remembered hymn. At the foot of the stairs, before making the turn down the corridor to the kitchen, he paused. 

There was something wrong. Something different in the air, a smell or a taste or just a  _ feeling,  _ sending the back of John’s neck prickling.... 

He crept into the living room, heart thumping. Still not used to the layout in the dark, he barely made it a foot before he bumped up against the coffee table and sent a stack of George’s books crashing to the floor.

There was a flash of movement in the dimness, and before John could make a sound, he was going down. 

He was on the ground and there was a massive weight atop him, growling and grunting and suffocating him and oh, God, oh Christ, Lord in Heaven was this how he was to die—

“Get off me! Get off!” he choked out. 

The weight lifted. “Shit, sorry,” drawled the attacker, “you woke me up. I thought you were a home invader.” 

John scrambled to his feet, drawing his robe around him as if it were a suit of armor, and flattened himself against the wall, hand fumbling blindly for the lightswitch.

“A home invader!?” he spluttered, as he found the switch at last and flooded the room with light. “I  _ live  _ here! Mind telling me who in the world  _ you  _ are? I’ll call the police, I— I’ll have you arrested, for breaking and entering, don’t think I won’t—!” 

To his dismay the stranger did not so much as flinch at this threat. He leisurely rose up off the carpet and folded his arms, looking John up and down, taking in the bedhead, the robe, the matching flannel pyjama set, the fluffy yellow slippers (a gag Christmas gift from Will years ago, which John had worn ever since in complete earnestness).

“Ned didn’t tell you I was coming?” the stranger said with a smirk. 

John hadn’t had a conversation longer than a sentence or two with Ned since moving in. The man was a nonpareil workaholic and spent so much time at the office he kept a pillow in a desk drawer. George and John were used to going weeks without sight of him, taking bets on how big his beard was getting in the meantime as he forwent shaving in favor of spare minutes to spend wading through his inbox.

“He didn’t?” the stranger inferred from John’s silence. “Ah, I’m sure he meant to, and just forgot. Bit of a birdbrain, our Eddie.” 

“ _ Our—? ... _ Eddie? You— you know him, then?” 

“Know him?” The man’s laugh was throaty and thick, rich like a smear of yellow butter on toast, and it went on for far longer than John found appropriate. “Grew up with the man. Taught him to roll smokes. Know him better than my own mum, is what I say.”

John had known in an abstract sort of way that Ned had Northern roots, but seeing as he’d met him at uni years after his speech had been smoothed over by a series of public schools, it had never really been made manifest until this moment, with a scraggly Merseysider standing barefoot in the front room at a quarter to six in the morning.

“Solomon Tozer, at your service,” announced said Merseysider, sticking out a hand and, when John failed to proffer his own, forcibly took it from where it hung limp at John’s side and pumped it up and down in a farcical parody of a handshake. His grip was viselike; his palm, very very warm.

“John Irving,” said John, extricating himself with some difficulty when it seemed clear Tozer had no plans to let go. 

“Ah, the famous Johnny!” 

“Just John is fine,” he snapped. Tozer raised an eyebrow, and John felt himself flush. He centered himself with a single deep breath like he’d learned and tried to salvage this meeting from the mortifying depths to which it had sunk. “You’re, ah, visiting, Solomon? For how long?”

“Call me Sol. And, well, I dunno if you can call it visiting if I’ve nowhere else to go.”

“Oh. You’re… without lodgings?”

“You can say  _ homeless _ , mate,” Tozer—Sol—said, “there’s no shame in it. And yeah, for now. Situation in Liverpool got a bit sticky, and Ned was kind enough to lend me use of your sofa till I’ve got it sorted out.” 

_ Without consulting his flatmates,  _ John barely restrained himself from adding. “Welcome to London,” he said tightly.

“Thanks kindly. Hardly know anyone here except for Ned,” said Sol. “And you, now, I guess.” He grinned happily; John’s stomach churned. 

For a terrifying moment he feared he’d be obligated to offer Sol tea, or even worse, breakfast—but then the newcomer yawned expansively and stretched his arms up above his head. His grimy hoodie rode up, revealing the gentle swell of a belly and a furred trail of golden-brown hair, cut into by the thick elastic of his boxers. 

“Only went to sleep when I got in around four,” he said through the yawn, “so I’ll head back to it now.” 

“Right. Well.” 

“Sorry about knocking you down. Instinct and training, you know.” 

“Perfectly fine,” said John. 

He turned away and strode stiffly into the kitchen, mechanically began the process of assembling his breakfast. 

He’d really need to find time to talk to Ned as soon as possible about this whole unexpected house-guests business. It just wasn’t right, being tackled by a stranger in one’s own flat. 

This Tozer fellow was quite heavy. He could have killed John, easily! He was probably ex-military—what was that he’d mentioned about training? Thick-set and muscled, but gone a touch to seed, clearly overeager for a bit of man-to-man… and what had he been doing up in Liverpool, to necessitate such a hasty exit? Selling drugs, probably—or worse, his own body, after having received a dishonorable discharge, for unmentionable behavior… 

John belatedly realized that the kettle was whistling, and had been for some time. 

❧❧❧

“But he’s a great guy, John,” Ned was saying, cornered at last by John on Sunday afternoon in the kitchen. “We grew up together.” 

“I’m not arguing that,” John said, mindful of his volume with the “great guy” in question passed out in the next room, “but  _ you  _ don’t work from home,  _ you’re  _ not the one who had to listen to him stomp around and belch and blast Stormzy all day yesterday! He needs to find an Airbnb, or something, a hostel, he could sleep in the park, I don’t care!”

“It’s just for a week or two, while he gets back on his feet,” Ned said tiredly. The bags under his eyes had deepened during their eviction crisis and now seemed to have set up permanent camp, complete with their own postcode and welcome mat. 

He worked in shipping and logistics, at a big company that did complicated things essential to the flow of goods across the world’s oceans. There was always something his boss needed doing, and somehow it always had to be Ned to do it, even though John had to assume that logically the man must have other employees. 

This Crozier fellow seemed rather like a despot to John, from what he heard-second hand from Ned, always abusing his assistant and coming in sozzled and suchlike. But then, John felt all bosses were much of a type, and was grateful for the independent lifestyle he’d successfully settled into after his attempt at a career in business had met an ignominious end. 

Ned’s career-mindedness was more of a burden than an asset to him, John believed, but he’d long given up on convincing him of anything of the sort. He was simply too loyal to the corporate cause, believed in it with all his heart, and in return received nothing but less sleep and more emails.

“You say that now,” John said, “but I  _ know  _ you. He’ll kick up his feet and still be here in a month’s time and you won’t do a thing but ask him what he wants for dinner!” 

“He was in a bad way up in Liverpool. This is a new start for him. He’s tremendous, I promise, if you get to know him—loads of fun at parties, fantastic at football, can drink anyone under the table, cooks up a mean curry, hard-working and healthy and really loyal…” There was an odd look in Ned’s eye as he recounted Sol’s virtues, something dreamy and distant and poorly concealed. “And… I owe him one,” he finished lamely, without elaborating.

“You don’t owe him  _ rent-free lodgings in central London _ ,” insisted John. “It’s not charity! It’s precisely the opposite! You’re doing him no favors, robbing him of the chance to improve on his own. He’s just going take advantage of you, and spend this time lazing around like a lump—” 

He cut off abruptly, as the lump in question came lumbering through the door from the living room. 

“Good morning, Sol,” said Ned, suddenly brightening. 

“Good  _ afternoon,”  _ corrected John. 

Sol lifted his head blearily and let out a sound that might have been a word but in all likelihood was not. 

“Late night?” asked John, unable to keep the judgement out of his voice. He’d gone to bed around nine-thirty as per usual and had been awoken an uncertain time later by the sound of the front door opening, and Sol’s heavy boots stomping their way out. 

He knew in an objective, distant sort of sense that people went out on Saturday nights, but neither he, Ned, nor George were clubbing types. That was why they got on, had done for a decade now, and the thought of some drug-doing, hard-partying  _ lad _ interrupting their amiable, laid-back peace raised his hackles like nothing else. 

Sol responded by scratching, extensively and luxuriously, at the crotch of his boxers, pushing that same hand up his face and through his hair, and then swinging open the cupboard door.

John watched with a kind of sickly fascination as Sol set down a bowl and added to it first milk, then a heaping of Frosted Flakes, then a few globs of Nutella straight from the jar, and finally shaking a truly abhorrent amount of brown sugar into the mix before stirring the whole thing up with a spoon.

He then eased himself down into the chair next to Ned with a loud grunt, and began shoveling the grotesque concoction into his mouth. 

John wanted to say something along the lines of  _ this is your ‘hard-working, healthy’ childhood mate, really, Ned?  _ but, given the situation, he simply had to make do with a heated glare, and hope Ned understood his meaning.

An awkward silence descended upon the table, which John decided there was no reason he had to tolerate. He pushed back his chair, scrubbed his lunch plate with brutal efficiency, and left without another word. 

From behind him came the sound of Sol’s distinct, throaty laugh. “So he wants me off the sofa, then? Could always share your room, Eddie.” 

“No, you can’t.” 

“C’mon, babe. It’d be just like old times.” 

John hurried up the stairs, ran into his room, and swung the door forcefully shut before he could hear Ned’s response to that. 

At the very moment the door’s slam echoed about his room, the window opened, the sash rocketing upwards with a shuddering jerk and bringing a blast of frigid air gusting into his room. 

John strode over and wrestled the window closed, a task far more difficult than he’d imagined. At last he won out and it slid closed, but his hand snagged against the latch on the way down, scoring a deep red line into his palm. 

“Jesus Christ!” he yelped. He shook his hand in the air, as if in one movement he could fling off both the pain and the frisson of ancient guilt that still reliably bubbled up every time he blasphemed.

***

“I’m not being paranoid,” said George.

“Of course not,” said John. 

“I’m not imagining it.” 

“No, I’m sure you’re not.” 

“But I swear to God, John, there is something very _wrong_ with this place. It’s in the air. It’s in the walls. It’s like there’s something—no, _someone_ looking at me, no matter where I am, what I’m doing! Something _intelligent.”_ His eyes darted from side to side, then met John’s again. “I think… the house is haunted. _”_

John smoothed his hands out on the table and held George’s watery, terrified gaze. The man had two advanced degrees and was in the middle of a third; he was by far the most well-read person John knew—and yet somehow, simultaneously, the most credulous. 

It truly dismayed John that someone so objectively intelligent could also be so very prone to flights of fancy. But he knew not everyone was privileged to have become as well-immersed in the calm, soothing waters of rationality as himself. 

“There are no. Such things. As ghosts,” he said slowly, as though speaking to a child. “And besides, if there really was _ —something  _ going on, wouldn’t Ned or I also have noticed? Heard things, seen things?” 

“You have, you’re just ignoring it,” said George insistently. “Strange sounds, cold spots, appliances turning on and off without anyone touching them… and Ned _has_ seen it!” 

“...What? Seen a  _ ghost? ”  _

“Did he not tell you?” 

“No, he’s not looking to break his not-telling-me-anything streak, apparently.” 

George glanced around as if they might be overheard, and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “He was leaving for work yesterday, and looked back up at the house from the pavement, and saw a  _ face  _ in the window! The one in your bedroom—he saw a pale man with a weird hat, staring right down at him!” 

“Ned is very stressed,” John said reasonably. “He’s working too much, as usual, and hallucinations are a common side effect of sleep deprivation. As soon as he gets a good kip in, all these ‘sightings’ will disappear, I can assure you.”

George contemplated this. “I suppose…. it might not be a ghost,” he said slowly.

“Yes, that’s right, of course,” said John, pleased to see he’d managed to make  _ some  _ kind of impact.

“I’ve read about how old houses like this one have lots of empty space built into the walls, for insulation, big enough for you to walk through,” he said. “There could be a—a homeless person secretly living in the walls, messing with our electrical—creeping out at night to steal our food! Watching us from the vents, that’s what they do, I saw this video on Reddit once—” 

John cut off George’s fevered excitement before it got out of hand. “Funny story, actually, we  _ do  _ have a homeless person living here. But he’s not in the walls, he’s currently in the front room, watching rugby and getting bits of crisp all over the sofa!” 

“I can hear you, you know!” came a shout over the sound of the television. George gave John a pointed look; John rolled his eyes. 

  
  


❧❧❧

It was just by chance that John spotted the tab open on Ned’s laptop when he walked past on his way to grab his phone charger from where he’d left it in the kitchen.

Ned was on Yelp, scrolling through reviews for psychics. A notebook open on the table bore, in his careful, almost cute handwriting, a notated list of names and phone numbers. 

“Oh, come on!” John groaned. “You’re not telling me you believe George’s mad ghost theory? This is mental! You’re sliding headfirst into a—a  _ folie a deux!  _ You’re both going to end up running onto the motorway!”

Ned looked up from his screen. “Calm down, John. Nobody’s going to be running onto any motorways,” he said, in a patronizing, placating tone, the kind John imagined him using when speaking to an intern, or perhaps the kind his boss took on when speaking to him. “I’m just doing my due diligence here. If George has good reason to believe there’s something going on, I don’t think we ought to ignore that. He’s very observant.”

“Observant? He’s  _ paranoid!  _ How long have we known him?” John exclaimed. “Don’t you remember when he was convinced that his thesis advisor was a Russian operative?” 

Ned wrinkled his nose. “I still think he might’ve been onto something with that. No real Englishman likes vodka that much… and remember how he disappeared, the week before exams, like he’d been reactivated, or something—” 

“Stop. Listen to me. This flat is  _ not haunted.  _ It can’t be!” 

“You seem awfully sure.” 

“Seem? I  _ am  _ awfully sure. I’m home all day, unlike you, practically living at the office! I’d  _ notice!  _ And did I mention the fact that  _ ghosts aren’t real?”  _

“How do you explain the doors slamming shut on themselves, then?” Ned said. “The windows opening, the heating turning on and off, things falling right off the shelves—” 

“It’s just the house!” John said, exasperated. “We’re not exactly living in the lap of luxury here! We get what we pay for, which is clearly a poorly maintained wreck of a place. You say spooky, I say derelict.” 

“Now you’re just being stubborn.” 

“No, I’m being  _ rational.”  _

“Christ, John,” Ned said with a sigh, “I know you grew up religious and all, but sometimes I think you’ve run too far in the other direction trying to get away from it. More things in Heaven and Earth, right? Without proof one way or the other, you can’t really say, can you?”

John felt his control of this situation rapidly slipping out of his hands, in the particular way that made him want to scream, kick over a chair, punch a hole in the wall—but it was two weeks in the new flat now, he still hadn’t had one of his Moments, and he wanted dearly to keep the streak going. 

So with some effort, he raised his hands in an admission of defeat, said “Whatever!” in what he hoped was not too harsh a tone, and strode off to the bathroom, where he planned to splash cold water on his face until the red behind his eyes receded. 

He entered, and then stopped short. 

Scrawled on the mirror, in scarlet letters a foot tall, were three words: _ OPEN YOUR MIND. _

John must have shouted, although he wasn’t aware of it, for seconds later Ned had skidded around the corner to stand behind him, gazing at the strange display. “What the fuck…?” 

“Did you do this?” 

“No! Of course not!” Ned leaned forward and rubbed a thumb into the base of the big red  _ O.  _ “Is this… lipstick?”

A lightbulb went off in John’s head. “Of course!” he cried. “It’s your best mate, Mr. Tozer, he’s behind  _ all  _ of this! Why didn’t I put it together sooner, I’m an idiot! The stuff disappearing, the lights, the thermostat, it’s  _ him!  _ No job, no responsibilities, nothing better to do than to take advantage of the kindness of his hosts in the most juvenile ways possible!” 

Ned folded his arms. “You’ve got no grounds for that accusation, other than that you don’t like him, for some reason which I absolutely cannot figure out. I mean, you don’t even have to share a bathroom with him!” 

John scoffed. “He probably picked the lipstick up on Saturday night, pinched it from whatever pretty little influencer he was trying to pull the panties off of at the club. Suppose it gave him a new idea for his little schedule of petty annoyances—” 

“Come off it,” Ned said, “he’s never been one for for pranks, or whatever this is, he’s not a  _ clown,  _ and besides, ‘OPEN YOUR MIND’ ? If it really was Sol, he’d have written something different, I’d think. He writes songs, you know, he’s very creative—” 

“Unbelievable,” said John, and stormed out of the bathroom.

“Hey!” called Ned after him. “I don’t have time to clean this up, you know!” 

❧❧❧

John observed Sol closely the next day as he worked. He considered logging the man’s movements in a dedicated document on his laptop but thought that would be a bit too George of him, so instead satisfied himself with a running mental index. 

_ 7AM: Asleep. 8AM: Asleep. 9AM: Up to piss. Loudly. 10AM: Asleep. 11AM: Up at half-past, consumed coffee with enormous amounts of milk & sugar, sat scrolling through phone at kitchen table. 12PM: Back to sofa. Television on. Loudly.  _

John worried at first he was being too obvious about it, peeking in around the doorway to the front room to check to see if the man had moved at all, but soon Sol’s complete ignorance of him began to feel almost like a purposeful affront. He dropped all pretense of subtlety as the afternoon rolled on, getting up from his laptop to “stretch” and pacing through the front room, right in between the television and the sofa where Sol lay sprawled, socked feet kicked up on the coffee table— but Sol didn’t even so much as give one of his trademark grunts in acknowledgement.

John spotted Sol stomping into the first-floor bathroom from his vantage point at the kitchen table around four. A bit later he looked up from his text editor and realized that Sol was taking an awfully long time in there, wasn’t he? 

So John got to his feet and crept up to the closed bathroom door, leaning his head against it, trying through hearing alone to ascertain if Sol was up to any funny business with the pipes or taps, or perhaps writing another one of his cryptic messages on the mirror.

The toilet flushed and John barely had a millisecond’s warning before the door swung inwards. He half-toppled forward, and was only kept upright by a forceful application of five wide fingertips to the center of his chest. 

Sol’s face was very close to John’s. “You’re not gonna wanna go in there for a while, mate,” he said with a smile, removed his hand, and shouldered past John into the corridor.

“Oh, good Lord,” croaked John, as the smell hit him.

“Told you,” he heard Sol cackle, before the tell-tale sound of his labored exhale as he flopped back down onto the sofa.

John couldn’t help how shrill his voice got when he shouted, “Did you even wash your fucking HANDS?!” 

  
  


❧❧❧

John wrapped on his current database contract that evening. He bundled up all the deliverables (along with that most precious of missives, the final invoice), sent them over to the client, and then, as a reward, headed off to the gym to climb. 

The place was crowded as usual on a Thursday night and he spent two glorious, sweaty hours attacking his favorite routes, the most advanced ones that sent his muscles burning and his face red and dripping sweat. 

Some preferred outdoor climbing, tackling new problems with every outing, looking down their noses at the gym rats who climbed under fluorescent lights with thick blue mats below. 

But John loved the feeling that came with knowing the path of the route to its last detail, the shape of its holds under his hands, the precise steps needed to ascend to the top. Nobody could take that away from him, no one could disprove it nor argue its truth.

Above him was the peak, the height he hungered for, the pinnacle that would prove he understood the world in all its orderly beauty, if only he could prove himself worthy of it. And below him, only chaos, only the looming, gaping absence of all sense; the superstitious, punitive darkness of his childhood, always sending tendrils after him, trying to drag him down.

Like George’s insistent paranoia, and Ned’s weak acquiescence to it: it inflamed him, brought out the worst in him, it reminded him too deeply of what he’d done his best to leave behind—

“Fuck!” 

Distracted, he’d missed his next foothold completely, slipping off the wall and swinging out into midair. 

He dangled there uselessly for a moment, harness digging into his thighs, before calling down to his belaying partner that he was done for the night. Then he rappelled down, trying to keep his breath steady as he went. 

  
  


❧❧❧

Exhausted and pleasantly sore by the time he got home, John crawled into bed and fell asleep almost immediately. 

His dreams had been jittery and confused for weeks. At first he’d chalked it up to the stress of the surprise eviction, but they’d lingered long after settling into the new place, becoming stranger and more intricate each night. Tonight was no exception. 

He dreamed of nothing solid, just endless, constantly shifting landscapes: grimy, labyrinthine alleys lit by flickering gas-lamps; great factories filled with smoke and terrifying, loud machines; barren fields of ice and rock where the sun beat down mercilessly without any warmth at all. 

He was being pursued—there was something behind him, advancing relentlessly, something monstrous and massive. Every atom in him wanted to turn and finally face it, he longed to sink to his knees and submit, but he  _ knew,  _ in his mind, his rational, awake mind, that doing so would mean something worse than death, he couldn’t, he  _ mustn’t— _

When he awoke with a start, long before his alarm was due to go off, at first he wasn’t quite sure why. The dream still lingered in his body: his heart was pounding, his skin was sticky with sweat, and beneath the sheets his cock was at half-mast.

Then he opened his eyes fully, and saw that there was someone in his room, standing past the foot of his bed. 

The first half-asleep thought John had was that it must be Sol, that he’d caught him in the act in the middle of one of his horrible pranks.

But the man looked nothing like Sol. He was short and thin, but not gaunt, with a long, pointed face like a pale crescent decorated with a sparse beard and a prominent, graceful nose. His eyes, light and clear, shone with a devilish gleam in the moonlit half-dark; his hair hung down past his ears to just touch the odd, old fashioned collar he wore. 

“What the…?” John murmured. Was he still dreaming? 

The man swayed forward, approaching from where he’d been leaning against John’s new dresser. John scrambled to turn on the bedside lamp— but when he did, he knew he’d made a horrible mistake.

Because now he saw the gaping wound in the man’s chest, ragged and encrusted, as if he’d been stabbed violently, dozens of times. The front of his shirt, hanging loose underneath an open waistcoat, was shredded and bloodstained.

John was no doctor, but he knew that no man could be up and walking around with an injury like that. Not with that amount of blood lost, not with the way the wounds seemed to have festered, rotted, bled together, revealing the ribs beneath. 

Then the man moved even closer, and that was when John very nearly screamed. 

He was  _ see-through, _ just slightly—through his skin and his bloodied clothing John could see, blurry and shifting but  _ there,  _ the lines of the dresser behind him— 

“No,” John said. “No, no!” 

“Yes,” said the apparition, with a smirk. “Yes, yes, yes.”

The ghost—because Christ alive, he  _ was  _ a ghost, he couldn’t be anything else— _ floated,  _ rising up off the ground and over the edge of his bedframe, until he was standing on the mattress, his hands on his hips, his pose jaunty and triumphant. 

“This isn’t happening,” cried John, “I—I don’t  _ believe _ —” 

“You best start believing in ghost stories, John. You’re in one.” 

John blinked.

“... Pirates of the Caribbean? No?” 

“I h-haven’t seen it,” stammered John. 

“Damn, that’s a shame. Great film, great film.” 

“But—you’re dead.” 

“Yes?”

“How can you have seen films?”

“ _ That’s  _ what you’re going with? Not—what’s your name, or how are you, or nice weather we’re having lately, or, my, you are by far the most handsome ghost I’ve ever seen, my good sir—and here I was, thinking you were such a polite young man!” 

“I’m dreaming,” babbled John, “I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming, this is just a dream!” He was panicked, pushing himself up against his headboard, drawing his knees up to his chest and clutching his blanket tight.

“I regret to inform you that you’re wide awake, John,” said the ghost, looming over him. “Since you didn’t ask, my name is Cornelius Hickey. I died in this house a hundred and seventy years ago. In this very room, actually, right where you’re sleeping. Small world, isn’t it?”

“What do you want?” whimpered John. “What are you going to do to me?!” 

Hickey smiled. All teeth. “Why, I’m going to seduce you, of course.”

❧❧❧

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 👻 Title is from Irving's letters: _"I have tried again and again, and am convinced that on board ship I shall never be happy; I have trifled on the very verge of perdition; every day I find myself placed in situations of every kind of peril and temptation, so that I can hardly escape."_ Oh, John.
> 
> 👻 The book George was reading is the classic anthropological text _The Golden Bough._
> 
> 👻 Sol definitely washed his hands, he was just fucking with John. 
> 
> 👻 I promise the rest of the chapters will have sex in them. 
> 
> 👻 Vitally, in my head, this whole thing has cinematography/editing a la Succession, The Thick Of It, etc.


	2. Chapter 2

There was a ghost in John Irving’s bed. 

This was not a metaphor for heartbreak over a past relationship, nor a commentary on the reliably boring white shade of his high thread count sheets.

The fact was that no matter how he spun it, no matter how hard he threw it up against the solid concrete ramparts of rationality in his mind, John could not deny the fact that the glowing, translucent figure perched on his mattress was definitely, incredibly, absolutely, positively a ghost. 

Hickey dropped soundlessly to his knees, crawling up the mattress towards John. His eyes gleamed with a spectral, iridescent shine that bore into John’s own retinas, searing them with unearthly light. 

John had to ask. He couldn’t keep it inside any longer. “W-why are you wearing a top hat?” 

“Because I died in it, obviously. Don’t kill the mood.” 

John was paralyzed, and could do nothing as Hickey came ever closer, sliding up the mattress. “I’ve been paying attention to you,” Hickey crooned. “Ever since you moved in. I’ve watched you work. I’ve watched you read. I’ve watched you play your pretty—little—games.” He punctuated these last three words with little waves of his hand, like an orchestra conductor. 

The way Hickey leered at John, the appraisal and the intent, was more horrifying than any ghost, bloodstain, or wound. Like John was a slab of meat on a butcher’s block, a fox with the great hunt bearing down. 

Hickey was only inches away now. “And I think you’re just my type. Hence this little introduction…” 

“Get away! Get off me!” shrieked John. He flapped his blanket at Hickey, which turned out to be a mistake: it passed clear through Hickey’s form, which cued a lurch of dissonant nausea in John’s stomach, made him sickeningly aware of the utter unreality of the situation.

“Christ, calm down,” said Hickey. “I’m just trying to get a good look at you. Just want to see you, John, up close and personal—” 

“Get  _ off!”  _ repeated John. He weaponized the blanket again, closing his eyes this time so he didn’t have to witness Hickey’s awful incorporeality.

“Gah, stop it, stop it, that doesn’t half tickle— alright! Alright, fine.” 

John felt the ghost draw away, and hesitantly opened his eyes again.

Hickey had perched himself on the edge of the bed, and now he pulled out from his pocket what looked to be a small sachet of tobacco. John watched with sick fascination as the ghost of a man rolled the ghost of a cigarette and proceeded to light it, with what naturally had to be the ghost of a match. 

The smoke that Hickey breathed out had no aroma, and seemed to be wafted about not by the stagnant air of the chilly bedroom but by a wind blowing from somewhere else entirely.

John continued to quake irrepressibly. He wanted to flee, to run, to head downstairs and curl up on the sofa—in the logic of his fear-addled mind he was very nearly positive that surely the ghost wouldn’t be able to follow him there, having forgotten that one of the three Classic Ghostly Traits was being able to walk through walls [1]— and go back to sleep. 

Unfortunately what awaited him downstairs was hardly a safe refuge. The thought of having to explain to a skeptical, sleepy Sol, sprawled across the sofa, why he’d come clattering down in the middle of the night, hyperventilating in fear, was viscerally unappealing.

“W-what are you going to do?” John managed to say. “Watch me sleep?” 

Hickey blew out a stream of phantom smoke. “Yeah, I might,” he said. “You’re pretty when you’re scared, but even prettier when you’re not.” 

“I’m not— I don’t—” John stammered. Beneath his blanket, his cock twitched traitorously. 

“You’re not scared?” Hickey said. He smirked. “Or you’re not pretty? Dunno if you have a leg to stand on regarding either.” 

John curled up even further, knees to his chin, as if he could shrink himself down to Borrowers size and scurry away, down the bedpost and into the walls, where he’d much rather face one of George’s hypothetical kleptomaniac homeless revenants than either Hickey or Sol, in his state—

Because why was he so fucking  _ hard?  _ Objectively, medically speaking, the biological reaction to fear ought to include the utter absence of arousal. His cock should have rightfully been a shriveled, inert lump between his legs, instead of—the opposite of that. 

Even if Hickey  _ weren’t  _ a ghost, there being a  _ man  _ in his bed shouldn’t do this to him, he wasn’t even—he’d never—it’s not like Hickey was even  _ attractive,  _ objectively, besides! He was kind of scrawny and odd-looking and  _ rude  _ and small and his hands were spidery and delicate as he sat there, smoking his cigarette, glowing in the dark, and John found smoking to be an awful, ugly habit, anyway. (The fact that he had formed that opinion only after quitting his own pack-a-day routine a few years ago didn’t make it any less valid.)

“Go back to sleep, John,” said Hickey, sinister and soothing. “It might be the last good night’s rest you get for a long, long time.”

❧❧❧

  
  


John shot up in bed, breathing hard.

In the bright winter light streaming in through the curtains, it seemed utterly impossible that what happened last night had been anything other than the dream of a particularly stress-addled subconscious. 

According to his bedside clock, it was half-past ten in the morning. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept in this late. He might not have, ever, in his entire life. 

Feeling incredibly stupid, he got up and examined his mattress, and then the dresser, for— for what, he didn’t know exactly, some kind of proof. Ectoplasm, that was a thing, right? Or perhaps some sort of ghostly burn mark, where Hickey had stubbed out his cigarette… 

Obviously, he found nothing. He shouldn’t have even bothered—but it had seemed so  _ real,  _ he was  _ sure  _ he’d been awake. 

Alone in his room, silent and shivering, he felt the need to talk to someone, anyone, about anything, just to sort him out, put him safely back on the straight and narrow. Ned was at work, the universal constant. Sol was likely still asleep, possibly not for long, but John would rather kiss a tarantula than recount to Sol a single word of his ghoulish nightmare. 

That left George. Downstairs, his bedroom door was open a crack, and John could see that he was at his desk, the broad mahogany built-in that had come with his library of a bedroom, currently piled with books and papers. 

John paced back and forth a few times in front of the doorway, mind absolutely blank of what to say that wouldn’t immediately invoke suspicion. As he dallied, his phone buzzed against his hand where he’d shoved it in his dressing gown pocket. 

_ EL: hey are you slammed today _

_ JI: Not particularly, just wrapped on client last night. Why? _

_ EL: need you to pickup food for party. work is mad don’t think i’ll be able to swing by in time :( :( :( _

_ JI: What????????? What party????????????? _

_ EL: housewarming party tonight remember _

_ JI: You never told me.  _

_ EL: i put it on fb thought you saw _

_ JI: I literally deleted mine months ago, you know that.  _

_ EL: ahhhh soz _

_ EL: been really busy _

_ EL: but can you pick up? will send address its close by _

_ JI: Yeah, sure.  _

The telltale stomping rumble of Sol’s footsteps came from the corridor behind John as he hit send. 

He followed the man into the kitchen. “Did you know about this?” he said, waving his phone in Sol’s direction. “This—housewarming party business. It’s tonight, apparently.” 

John regretted asking as soon as the words had left his mouth, because of course Sol’s immediate response was to smile that idiotic, shit-eating grin that caused John’s internal organs to shift and squirm under its direct beam. 

“Was my idea,” Sol said proudly. “I thought, you’ve got such a lovely little flat here—”

“Bit of an overstatement.” 

“—but you’ve not had anyone over. And Ned deserves to let loose a little, I had no idea how much of a drudge he’d become, honest. Work this, work that. Never any fun at all. He wasn’t at all like this when we were tog—when we were younger.” 

John chewed at his lip, blinked, processing this. 

Sol took his hesitation as disapproval. “You don’t like parties?” he asked. 

“I—ah,” John said. It would be tantamount to lying if he told Sol that he didn’t enjoy parties. Despite his dislike of the club scene, he did, historically speaking, have a track record of enjoying a good party—in fact, enjoying it a bit  _ too  _ much, oftentimes ending up with his head in a toilet, or his clothes some yards distant from his body, or, in one memorable case, a video of him falling down the stairs circulating widely on Whatsapp. 

He decided to avoid the question entirely. “Do you plan on cleaning up, then? Your mess, in the front room, not exactly your classic party decorations, is it, unless there’s some full-ashtray trend sweeping the nation.” 

“Well, aren’t you in a state,” Sol remarked. “Have some coffee?” He pointed to the pot he’d been brewing while they’d been talking.

“I don’t drink coffee,” John said icily. 

“You seem knackered. It’ll help.”

“I can stay awake quite fine without it, thank you,” said John, and went to go, feeling proud he’d managed to quash his immediate impulse, which involved a pithy insult to Sol’s overly saccharine way of taking his coffee.

“Oh, sure you don’t, bet that stick up your arse helps keep you lively all day.” 

“Excuse me?” John whirled on Sol. “What did you say?” 

Sol didn’t even do John the favor of turning back around to face him. “Just talking to myself,” he said, stirring sugar into his mug. 

John gritted his teeth, headed back out of the kitchen, and gave George’s door a perfunctory knock before letting himself in. 

“Hey! I’m just working on the playlist for the party,” said George as John approached his desk. “What do you—” 

“So you knew about it too! Unbelievable! I didn’t even get a chance to invite anyone!” 

George gave him a sympathetic look over top of his ridiculous round reading glasses. “No offense, but would you have invited anyone Ned or I didn’t already? I’ve got people from school coming, and Ned’s got his office folks, but all our other friends are your friends too.”

“I don’t—urgh, that doesn’t  _ matter,  _ it’s the  _ principle  _ of the thing, did he think I was going to try and  _ stop  _ it or something if I knew, because I wouldn’t have, I’m not the  _ party police,  _ just because I—” 

“John, calm down,” George interrupted, “I’m sure he just forgot.” 

John stuttered to a halt, and took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “It’s—I didn’t sleep well at all last night, is all…” 

“It’s alright,” said George. He was always very forgiving, which John was grateful for at the moment, though whether that was out of genuine sympathy or out of a desire to just not deal with other people’s problems for any longer than absolutely necessary had never been quite clear. 

“Anyway,” he said, turning back to his computer, “I’m thinking two playlists so we can swap between them as mood dictates…his one has all of the beat-heavy stuff, Bonobo, Tycho, a bit of Reznor/Ross, and then the other one’s got more pep, some Shins, Foals, Local Natives…” 

John nodded along, hardly paying attention—George’s music taste was as arcane and impenetrable to him as the Brythonic glossaries George had done his first dissertation on—and instead trying to find the bright side of this party business.

He just needed to relax, was all. Not  _ too  _ much, mind you, for that way lay shame captured evermore on various camera rolls, but just enough to stop fixating on his weird, realistic, sexy ghost dream for a while— 

—No, hang on,  _ sex  _ ghost, not sexy. He’d not been sexy at  _ all.  _

  
  


❧❧❧

Predictably, Ned was stuck at work late, and John and George had to compensate for his absence on their own. To John’s deep amazement, Sol pitched in, cleaning up his space in the front room and scrubbing down the coffee table—but he couldn’t allow a single act of charity, probably enforced by desperate texts from Ned, to color his view of the man. 

The food was acquired, the playlists were set in stone after hours and hours of George’s alchemical futzing, and shortly after eight the first guests began to arrive. 

By the time Ned finally shambled in, the front room had long filled up to a comfortable density. Overflow spilled out into the corridor and back into the kitchen, where friends from their uni days—Graham Gore, Charlie Des Voeux, and the legendary Henry Le Vesconte (Dundy to his friends, That Motherfucker to his enemies)—were mixing their own ridiculous drinks from random pantry items, as was their custom. 

Clustered in front of the big bay window of the front room were the rest of Ned’s work crowd— most of whom John had never met, though he did recognize Tom Hartnell, who’d once come to their old flat in person in the middle of the night to drag Ned out of bed on account of some Crozier-related emergency—making nice with a few of the guys from George’s program. John itched to ask George if the short one with the beard was the one he’d sworn was secretly dating a professor, but he was across the room by the fireplace, holding court with a leggy redhead coworker of Ned’s. Beyond all sense and reason, she seemed genuinely interested in whatever obscure academic topic he was clearly miles deep into a lecture on, which John made a mental note to congratulate him on later.

And lastly, sitting around the coffee table, slung across the sofa and the folding chairs that had been pulled up, were a group of total strangers who John could only assume were the new mates Sol had met on his nights out since arriving in London. 

They were a scruffy lot, all sharing Sol’s indefinable air of long-term underemployment and questionable diet, and they stood out amongst the otherwise late-twenties young-professional crowd like a bargain bag of crisps left carelessly in the fresh fruit section by an indecisive shopper. 

There was a petite boy in a red jacket who literally looked about eighteen, and on the opposite end of a spectrum, a man with a bald pate and a curly beard shot through with silver. Honestly,  _ where  _ had Sol picked this pack up? A vacant lot in Stoke Newington? 

“Thank you  _ so  _ much for grabbing the food,” Ned said as John came up to greet him at the door. His tie had been loosened and his hair had fallen in disarray across his forehead; the telltale signs of a Tube ride home spent praying he wouldn’t come up the escalator to find a mass of missed calls demanding he turn around and head right back. “Nightmare at work. God, you wouldn’t believe it if I told you.” 

“Uh huh,” said John, who had the feeling Ned was about to tell him anyway. Sure, he’d consistently fail to give a heads-up about such important and relevant events as “ghost” “sightings” or “housewarming” “parties,” but work drama John had absolutely no interest in, why, there was nothing more Ned would rather fill him in on.

“My boss’s boss has this new guy under him, and he’s—honestly, he’s a bit of a toff, nobody even knows how he got hired, no experience in the industry at all, and so  _ my  _ boss obviously  _ hates  _ him, and today there was this unbelievable row when the new guy cocked something up and Crozier didn’t even  _ tell  _ him, like for a full  _ day…”  _

John’s eyes glazed over as Ned went into gritty detail about the internecine drama, which apparently had something to do with the coordinates of a new shipping route.

“.... and so next thing I know it’s half-past eight and I’m  _ still  _ there sorting it, even Crozier’s assistant left before me, which—oh! There he is,” Ned said, and moved off from John without another word, going up to a dark-haired guy by the window and hesitating for a comical moment before clapping him awkwardly on the shoulder. 

John couldn’t help smiling fondly. Ned, out of his natural environment of the office, could always be depended on for quality entertainment, like watching a penguin at the zoo who’d somehow made his way into the flamingo enclosure.

Sol’s assertion that Ned hadn’t always been such a drone didn’t square well with what John knew of him, going all the way back to their uni days—unless he became a completely different person when he was alone with Sol, which seemed unlikely. 

Circulating the flat, John nodded at acquaintances, conscientiously nursing his single bottle of pale ale at a steady, calculated pace. 

There was quite a bit of “Haven’t seen you in ages!” and “Fucking hell, Irving, what have you been up to?” as if he were a wizened hermit emerging from a crumbling folly, clutching a tortoise.

But he supposed that’s what he got for deleting social media, for abstaining from the modern temptations of the swipe and the double-tap and the infinite scroll. His acquaintances might miss out on updates of every mundane second of his private life, but he had the benefit of a pure mind, a psyche unaffected by algorithmic toxicity. 

Eventually he ended up in a conversation with Graham, a genuinely very interesting one about Graham’s latest overland hike through rural Iceland, but as Graham talked animatedly John’s eyes kept getting drawn over to the sofa. 

Empty bottles and cigarette butts had begun to accumulate once more on the coffee table in front of it, as if drawn there by natural forces to fill up the vacuum left by earlier clean-up efforts, or perhaps on account of the presence of Sol, the great grime magnet himself.

Sol was—very  _ broad.  _ Yes, that was the word to use, a perfectly objective observation to make regarding his nightmare houseguest: he was wide, and solid, and dense, and the air of confidence he projected disturbed John deeply. Nobody should be allowed to come off like they liked themselves that much, certainly nobody with as little actually going for them in life as Solomon Tozer. 

The man he was talking to—kid, really, he couldn’t have been more than twenty-two—had come closer and closer, until he was practically in Sol’s lap next to him on the sofa. As John watched, Sol actually lifted one of the kid’s legs, dropped it in between his own, squeezed it gently between his thighs. 

In plain view of everyone at the party, Sol began to nose at the kid’s neck, pushing his face into the junction of his ear and chin; whispering something, John thought, but then Sol’s tongue darted out, licking at the skin there. He sent a hand around, sliding up under the kid’s jumper—

“Tozer!” 

Sol drew away, looked up. “What’s happening?” he said, ever so casually, one hand still tangled in the kid’s voluminous dark curls. 

“Come on,” said John harshly. “Get up.” 

When Sol hesitated, John grabbed onto his wrist and hauled him up off the sofa, displacing the kid, whose big blue eyes shone up at Sol as if he were a favorite toy being removed by a cruel governess. 

“Sorry, Tommy,” called Sol, “back in a sec—ouch, John, let go, I’m not a dog on a leash—!” 

John ignored Sol, held on tight as he dragged him through clusters of guests out the door and onto the front step. It was freezing out but John hardly felt it, his mission like glowing embers inside him. 

“I am aware of your…  _ proclivities,”  _ John said, “and rest assured, I hold no personal prejudices against your sort, but I simply don’t think it is  _ appropriate  _ to—” 

“I’m not gay, John.” 

“...you’re not?”

“Nah,” said Sol. “I’ll fuck anything that moves. So you better stay very still, hey?”

The shame that had built up in John’s chest, ready to cascade out as a flood of guilt-ridden apology, sublimated instantly into righteous rage. 

“How dare you?” he hissed. “You can’t—you’ve never taken anything seriously in your life, have you? You don’t  _ care,  _ Tozer, and that’s your problem right there!” 

Sol folded his arms around himself while John declaimed, thumbs worrying at the worn sleeves of his hoodie, and he nodded at John, silently but with a clear message of  _ Well, get on with it. _

“I can’t possibly put this off any longer. It’s been weighing heavily on me. Causing me…deep distress.” 

“Strong start,” scoffed Sol. “What’s next,  _ I love you, most ardently?”  _

“Look at me, and listen to me,” John said forcefully. He drew himself up to his full height. With Sol’s slouch taken into account he had a good few inches on him, though somehow he still felt small standing before the man.“This has to end.You’re better than this. Whatever you’re doing here, you must devote yourself to putting a stop to it. I know very well Ned doesn’t have a problem with you staying forever. He’ll never ask you to leave, or pay rent. Someone’s got to take responsibility, and I don’t mind it being me, because it’d be for your own good. You have  _ got  _ to get off that sofa, and soon.” 

Sol’s face twitched, but John forged ahead before he could interrupt.

“There are—so many things you could be doing. You’re full of potential, I can see it in you, but you’ll never reach it if you carry on like this. You ought to be exercising, eating better. Earning money—volunteering—” 

“Volunteering?” 

“Your crisis is an opportunity for you to repair yourself,” John said. “And you’re in the world’s best place for it. This is London! There’s a whole city out there, full of roads to lead you out of this hole you’ve dug yourself—” 

“You don’t know a bloody thing about me,” Sol said, and he was still smiling, but there was a venom in his voice now John had never heard. It turned his casual lilt into something sinister. He leaned towards John on the step, arms still folded about himself, and John automatically took a step back, nearly falling into the hedge below the front window.

“I was in the Marines,” Sol said, as John found his balance again, “for seven years. Never planned on leaving. But I got a compassionate discharge because my mum was dying. Cancer, really fucking brutal shit, but she’d’ve had a chance. So they tell me. Didn’t matter much, though, what the doctors said, because the bloke she’d married a year ago was wrapped up in some cult shite. A real Facebook conspiracy nut, d’you know the type? And he’d dragged her into it. Convinced her to avoid treatment. Barely let her leave the house. Had her trying oils, herbs, anything but actual medicine. I couldn’t get through to her, he wouldn’t let me. Had to watch her fade away, just like that.”

The sound of George’s indie playlist, probably a band called Dirty Animals or Moth Hunter or something, filtered out through the half-open door from inside, giving Sol’s story an incongruous, jangly background. 

John considered, just for a moment, the idea that Sol was having him on, pulling some sort of prank, like the nonsense around the house, the words on the mirror.

But he wasn’t an idiot. This was real. 

“And then she was gone, and I found out she’d left everything to him,  _ everything.  _ All the money, the house, the dog. He’d gotten his claws in her so deep, the hurt didn’t even stop when she died, you know? But he was letting me stay, letting me help sort her stuff, at least.”

His tone was light, and a smile still lingered on his face as he spoke, which made everything he was saying all the more horrible. “He saw me, one night in town. Leaving a club with a guy. And that was it. Wanted me out, after that. My mum had known, she didn’t care, but she was gone, he’d made sure of that.”

John stammered, “I—I’m sorry, Ned didn’t tell me, he never tells me  _ anything,  _ I—” 

“He didn’t tell you cos he doesn’t know,” said Sol simply. “I didn’t tell him. I didn’t need to, when I told him things had gotten bad and I needed a place to stay. He  _ trusts  _ me, the fucker. Not that he should, but hey. There are worse men to have the ear of.”

“I—yeah,” John said helplessly, because Ned  _ was  _ a good guy. Sure, he could be a bit dour, a bit tight-laced—but he was intensely loyal, devoted, even, and always eager, whether in work or in life, to help fill a perceived need. Of  _ course  _ he wouldn’t have had to know the details before inviting Sol for an indefinite stay, of  _ course  _ he would’ve seen immediately that Sol required space and time and no questions asked at all. 

“And I know, I know I’m not exactly doing fucking fantastic, yeah? I don’t need you to tell me that, I’m as pissed off as you are about it. Ask Ned to show you a picture of me in my uniform sometime.” 

“I didn’t know,” said John helplessly, “I didn’t know.” 

“Yeah, got that bit,” said Sol. He seemed more impermeable than ever, his chin raised just a bit, showing off his sturdy neck and shoulders like defended battlements. “You never do, though. Helps if you don’t assume. For example, John. The minute I met you, I could’ve decided you were a prick, which would’ve been a reasonable thing, seeing as you fucking are one, but I figured some things had gone wrong for you, too. Haven’t they? Why don’t you tell me about one, we can call it even.” 

John mumbled something. 

“Come again?”

“....sheep simulator. Stupid app… game… thing. This Australian company…” That was as much as John could force out before his jaw thankfully snapped shut out of self-preservation.

“Ah, a failed app,” Sol repeated. “A classic story. You know, I heard the secret is to make things people actually enjoy using.” 

A chilly breeze blew across the front step, ruffling Tozer’s shaggy hair, but John’s face was burning too hot to feel it. 

How on God’s green earth had he made a hash of it this badly? John could swear he’d been positive he could have Sol crafting a keto meal plan and applying to train as a barista in five minutes flat. And yet here he was, now fully and completely unmanned by his hoodie-wearing, beer-guzzling slob of a houseguest. 

Sol unfolded his arms in order to shove them down in his sweatpants pockets, and then tipped his head towards the door. 

“Come on, I think karaoke’s about to start,” he said, casual as anything, and slipped back inside. John, for lack of any other options, followed right behind. 

  
  


❧❧❧

Karaoke had been a tradition of theirs since uni, and they all had their standbys. George could do a wicked “Staying Alive,” and Ned had developed the unlikely skill of being able to break out the Leonard Cohen without dropping the mood of the room at all, and sometimes even actively raising it.

But tonight was special, or so George declared with a disproportional amount of excitement as he set up, because he was debuting a new one. 

_ Da-na-na-na-na-na na-na,  _ went the jaunty instrumental music.  _ Da-na-na-na-na-na-na.  _ The colored bar inched across the screen, slowly, slowly, until—

“Tequila,” George intoned, completely deadpan, and the entire room—desk jockeys, post-grads and all—roared with laughter, John included. For some reason it was the funniest goddamn thing he’d ever seen. He laughed so hard, perched on the arm of the sofa, that he toppled over, landing half in Sol’s lap. 

The impact drew a huff of surprise out of Sol, and John mumbled a hasty, “Sorry, sorry.” Pushing himself off involved bracing a hand on Sol’s leg, that wide and warm edifice, but soon he’d repositioned himself safely up on his perch. Charlie Des Voeux, standing on his other side, made to pass a bottle of vodka over to Sol, skipping John by default as he’d consistently declined earlier in the night, but John desperately reached out and intercepted it, took a sizable swig and swallowed it down. 

After George had taken his bows, Charlie was next up with “Killer Queen,” which brought down the house, followed by Mr. Maybe-Fucking-A-Professor with a stunning rendition of “Call Your Girlfriend.” 

Four more passes of the vodka, one pass of a just-opened bottle of gin, and Hartnell’s “Mr. Brightside” later, it was John’s turn. 

He got to his feet and realized, with a giggle, that he was properly drunk. It had been a while, hadn’t it? 

“Right, right, hello, yes,” he said, picking his way forward and grabbing the mic from Dundy. “M’not gonna do fuckin’ ‘Champagne Supernova,’  _ Ned,  _ before you say a goddamn word.” He wagged a finger in Ned’s general direction. 

Ned’s work mates laughed uproariously; clearly the man’s obsessive fealty to Oasis had become just as much of a running joke round the office as it had in every flat John had ever shared with him. 

“I wasn’t going to—oh,  _ stop,  _ Tom,” Ned laughed, slapping away the hand that had landed on his arm, attached to the shiny-haired man John had seen him talking to earlier—Crozier’s assistant, wasn’t it. 

John queued up the tune, and hit play. It started slow, but that was good. All about the ramp up. As soon as the opening notes hit, George and Ned cheered—they knew what was coming, they knew the performance John was about to give. They’d not seen it in a few years now but who could forget? 

He didn’t need to look at the words as he sang. He turned out to face the assembled crowd, which seemed to have grown vaster, somehow, expanding far past the bounds of the small, dingy front room. This was his song. His time to shine. 

_ “Now I've had the time of my life _

_ No, I never felt like this before _

_ Yes I swear it's the truth _

_ And I owe it all to you…”  _

The walls tilted around him as he sang, and he felt his body tilt too, as he raised his voice for the female parts, dropped them comically low for the male ones. This was good—God damn, did he feel good! Fuck Tozer! He didn’t need him! He didn’t really care about him at all, did he? 

He’d just hit the second verse— _ “With my body and soul / I want you more than you'll ever know…”  _ —when he realized there was something wrong. 

The music was still going—he hadn’t forgotten any of the words, of course not—so why was everyone looking so strangely at him? Why had they stopped clapping and laughing and dancing along? Why was Tom-the-assistant pointing towards John with a concerned look, then whispering something into Ned’s ear?

John turned around. Then he stopped singing. 

Instead of the karaoke display, the classic and comforting colored text on a blue background, the television was showing something completely different. 

Naked bodies.  _ Men’s  _ naked bodies; two of them, to be specific, in a visceral configuration involving one’s cock and the other’s arse and muscles and hands and skin gleaming with sweat.

Closed-captioning helpfully provided a play by play of the action: 

_ [WET SOUNDS] _

_ FUCKING HARD COCK, THAT’S, WOW, FUCK. _

_ [ASS HOLE PENETRATION] FUCK _

_ [MOANING] YEAH I LIKE THAT _

_ OH FUCK, OH SHIT, OH YEAH, FUCK ME HARDER, HOLY SHIT _

_ [SQUELCHING NOISES] _

George scrambled for the remote; Sol dragged John off and sat him down in his spot on the couch while Ned fiddled madly with the ancient television, pressing buttons at random. But the men on the screen kept going at it, the music didn’t stop, and John felt very close to throwing up. 

At last George hit reset on the power strip and the whole system fell quiet and dark; someone in the room laughed nervously, breaking the silence, and just like that the incident was in the past, a joke, a funny story to be retold. 

Eventually they started up again; Dundy’s latest interchangeable model-singer-influencer-blonde girlfriend kicked it back off with an exuberant “Love On Top,” but by then John had stumbled up and away, down the hall to the kitchen, where he found more gin and was engaging in a concerted effort to transfer it from the bottle to his body. 

At some point, he was on the floor, watching disembodied feet move past his head. Then he was on the stairs, someone was helping him up—Ned, most likely, John would always recognize that steady, helpful hand on his arm, no matter how deep in his cups—and then into his bed, laying him down gently atop the neatly made sheets. 

“No, no,” John slurred, “not here, not here.” 

“I’ve put a bucket here for you, in case you need it—” 

“Please, I can’t stay, he’ll come—he’ll come and he’ll get me—he’s  _ here!”  _

“Shh, John. You’ll be fine. That’s right, lie back down, just like that. Take it easy.”

  
  


❧❧❧

  
  


John’s head was full of knives, his mouth was drier than one of George’s papers on the etymology of market town names in the Midlands, and he had to piss, horrendously badly. His limbs felt like lumps of lead, but he somehow managed to drag himself up in bed, somehow managed to pry open his encrusted eyes—

“Fuck!” 

“And a good evening to you too, my friend,” said the ghost of Cornelius Hickey, who was facing John with his arms behind his head at the foot of the bed, leaning leisurely against thin air. 

“Go away,” moaned John. “Please, just leave me alone.” 

“Oh, I don’t think I will,” said Hickey. “We’ve already had such fun tonight, why let it stop?” 

“It was _you—!”_ croaked John in dismay.”You put that—that disgusting— _that_ on the television!” 

“Glad to see your intellect is in as fine fettle as ever, Mister Irving,” Hickey said. “Did you like the selection? Some of Colby Keller’s finest work, though I do tend to prefer my erotica in literary form— old habits die hard, you know.” 

“Why would you do that?” John’s voice nearly cracked into a sob as the memory surfaced, vivid and pristine, from the depths—clearly his dedication to effacing it with copious amounts of alcohol had been utterly in vain. 

Hickey shrugged. “I’m a fun-loving fellow, what can I say?”

“And this is fun? For you? To humiliate me?” 

Hickey rose up off the bed, floated so that he was face-to-face with John, hovering a few feet above. “I’m dead, John. Dead as a desiccated dormouse, and let me tell you, the most important part of being dead is learning to entertain yourself. One has a great deal of spare time, you understand.” 

“But  _ why?  _ Why me, why not Ned, or George? _ ” _

“Boooo-ring,” cooed Hickey. “Just lads with jobs and shiny shoes and Oyster cards. But you.... now you’re _ interesting.”  _

John swallowed. “I don’t think I am, really.”

“Didn’t your mother ever teach you to take a compliment? Trust me, you  _ are.  _ You think you know everything about the world. It all makes sense to you, it simply must. And anything that doesn’t fit your way of seeing things, you bury deep or condemn to damnation. You’re nothing but an old-fashioned man of God.” 

“I’m—what? No, no,  _ no— _ I’m  _ not! _ ” he cried. More than anything, this was the worst thing Hickey could have done. The disgusting pornography, the seduction, the endless household chaos paled beside this unfounded accusation, which cut so neatly and surgically to John’s very center.

“Come off it,” said Hickey, showing off that smirk again and matching it to a judgmental roll of his eyes. “Men like you were a dime a dozen in my day. You could find them in any church pew, on any street corner, decrying the path of the sinner. Sure, instead of Jesus Christ and company you’ve got a god all your own, a god of logic and science, but it’s got just as many precepts, just as many forbidden ways to stray, hasn’t it?”

John wanted to clap his hands over his ears so he couldn’t hear it. But it didn’t work— already rising to the top of his mind were his father’s tales of hellfire, waiting for him down below, eager to burn him to the bone—

“It’s not the same,” said John, “it’s not the same at all!”

“You’ve traded the fear of one path to perdition for the fear of another,” said Hickey. “But I’ve got good news for you, John. Fear is a choice.” 

He began to slowly float downwards, towards the bed. John went stiff, cringing away, wishing he could sink down into the mattress, hide beneath the bed, away from Hickey’s beady eyes and wicked tongue.

“Let me touch you,” Hickey said, reaching out a hand.

“No,” John said. “No, you can’t, I—hold on.” Something had just occurred to him. “You  _ can’t  _ touch me. Last night, my blanket went right through you, I  _ saw  _ it!” He laughed, a hysterical sort of noise that tumbled right out of him. “You couldn’t touch me if you wanted to!”

“Oh? You want to bet?”

“I do,” said John, confidently. “Go on, try!” 

Hickey was only inches away, right above John as he stared up, with his head back on his pillow. 

He drifted a bit closer, then he leaned down, and pressed his lips to John’s. 

They were cool and soft, inhuman and dead—but very, very solid. John could feel them. 

And then Hickey pulled back; not a moment too soon, for an awful, painful fear had risen up in John, a fear like standing at the edge of a canyon, feeling that at any moment you might be unable to stop yourself from flinging yourself in.

If Hickey had not drawn away, John might have leaned up, sought a closer touch, opened his mouth to the ghost’s, let in an icy tongue—

“Skin to skin,” said Hickey smugly. “That’s the way it works for me. Any of mine to any of yours. And I do mean  _ any,  _ John. Picture it.” 

“The—the blood,” John said, apropos of nothing, to avoid as intently as possible the suggested act of  _ picturing it.  _ “Why’ve you got blood all over? Those wounds, who did that to you?”

Hickey shrugged. “Got murdered,” he said. “It happens.”

“How come?” John asked. 

“Bit of a personal question for the second date, don’t you think? Although, you’ve never been on a date, I wouldn’t think. You don’t seem the type. But there’s a first time for everything, isn’t there.”

Without preamble, he slowly began to undo the strange buttoned fly of his old-fashioned trousers.

“What are you doing?” cried John.

“Well, you wouldn’t let me at you,” said Hickey, “but that’s not going to stop me showing you a good time.”

Stupidly, John’s mind fixated on the fact that Hickey had no zipper, and that he didn’t even know when zippers had been invented, and whether Hickey had been jealous he’d died before getting to use them, and what other developments Hickey had been angry he’d missed out on, because 170 years is an awful long time to hang around after you died, had he just been watching films over the shoulders of whoever lived here that whole time, or had he found other ways to occupy his time? Had he done this—this  _ seduction— _ before, or was John the first, was he special—

By the time John re-focused, Hickey’s cock was out and he had his fingers around it, tugging it slowly, rolling the foreskin back with a gentle thumb, in no rush at all. 

Hickey tipped his chin up, stretching his neck one way and then the other, exposing the pale, soft-looking skin above his collar. He rolled his tongue inside his mouth suggestively, pressing it at the inside of one cheek, then the other, all as his hand found a steady rhythm on his cock. 

John hadn’t looked away yet. Why hadn’t he looked away? 

“In my day, we called this giving yourself a good frig,” Hickey purred. “Someone like you probably would’ve called it  _ self-abuse. _ But these days you’ve got so many more options. Look at me, John, I’m  _ having a wank.  _ I’m  _ jerking off.  _ And ooh, it feels  _ good—”  _

“Stop it,” John said, but it was an automatic, perfunctory sort of outburst, no real emotion behind it, and surely Hickey could tell, because he’d not even paused to acknowledge John’s request.

“How often do you do this?” Hickey said, luxuriating in his own touch, kicking his legs out in front of him as he stroked longer, harder. “What do you think about, when you do?” 

“I—I don’t,” said John. 

“You’re lying,” said Hickey, chased it with a little shiver and a moan as he increased his pace, fucking up eagerly into his hand. 

John cleared his throat and said, “There’s actually a whole community, of men who refrain from—” 

“Oh, I don’t care about your excuses,” Hickey interrupted. “You’ve always got them, but I can see right through them, easy.”

Then he laughed, and his laugh wasn’t the shrill villainous cackle John had been expecting. It was warm and low and gentle, even; horribly incongruous and powerful, too, in the way it stirred John, immediately undid all the hard work he’d been putting into keeping his cock unaware of the proceedings.

Hickey’s head arched back and he came, loosing an exuberant moan of pleasure as he pulsed over his fingers. The come gleamed the same sickly blue-green as the rest of his translucent form, which now grew more and more see-through, until only Hickey’s smile was left, glowing in the dark, and then that, too, was gone. 

Somehow John had managed to not wet the bed. He didn’t want to think about how much of a near thing it’d been. When Hickey didn’t reappear after a full thirty seconds, and John’s own stiffness had subsided a bit, he hauled himself to the toilet and relieved himself at last. In the mirror, he caught a glimpse of himself: he looked, well. Haunted.

“Buck up,” he told his reflection, rather pathetically.

❧❧❧

  
  


“I think it started at the party,” Ned was saying. “With that—that weird—with what happened, you know.” 

“No, he was acting strange earlier that day,” said George, matching Ned’s hushed tone, like they were gathered around a gravesite. “Earlier that  _ week,  _ even, now that I think about it….” 

“But it’s gotten worse, hasn’t it?” said Ned. “Sol, tell George what you told me, about what it’s been like with just you and him here, these last few days.” 

“Well, he’s sleeping later and later, sometimes later than me, even,” Sol said. “I’ve heard him crying in the shower, I think, when he left his door open. Could hear it all the way down at the bottom of the stairs. And as far as I can see, instead of doing any of his fiddly spreadsheet work, he’s been watching  _ The Sound Of Music.  _ Over and over.” 

“It  _ is _ his favorite movie,” Ned mused. “He always puts it on for a cheer-up, that’s not new.”

“Yeah, but has he ever gone round mumbling _‘How do you solve a problem like Cornelius_ ’ before?” Sol asked. “Who the hell is Cornelius?” 

John was leaning against the wall in the corridor, just out of sight of the kitchen table where his flatmates (and non-rent-paying houseguest) had gathered. He’d not meant to eavesdrop—it wasn’t his style at all—but he’d woken up late, horribly hungry, stumbled downstairs to scrounge together some breakfast, and heard them talking before he entered. 

He knew they were discussing him, of course. Of course they were, and he was sickly curious— how much had they noticed?

Because every night this past week, Hickey had come to him, as reliable as the postman. His face would come so very close to John’s but John would feel no hot breath on his cheeks, nothing other than the supernatural, icy chill that emanated from Hickey’s every inch. 

And had waited, with fear burning like acid low in his belly, for Hickey to  _ do _ something, to lift his head with those cold hands and force another cold kiss upon him, or some other invasion, too horrible to contemplate—but the touch never came, even as Hickey narrated to him what it would feel like when it did. 

He’d even gotten fed up enough to ask, to hiss out between gritted teeth all the while trying not to hear himself say it: “Just do it! Just stop talking about it, go on and fucking do it, and then let me go back to sleep!” 

“Where’s the fun in that?” Hickey had said, his furred upper lip contorting in a ruthless little pout. “You so very much want to not have a choice in it, as if that’d excuse you. Unfortunately for you, Jack dearest, I’m not in the business of absolution. You’ll have to be the one to ask.”

John did not wish to ask. There was nothing he wanted less. However the fact remained that there was a ghost in his bedroom, very often found wanking; upon one memorable midnight even sliding his trousers to his ankles, spreading his knees, and treating John to a finger-led tour of his own ghostly anus. 

John had tried to explain to Hickey, for lack of anything else to talk about, how from an evolutionary perspective homosexuality was maladaptive; how his own decision to abstain from sex and dating was not a comment on his own orientation but merely a display of commitment to his health and career; et cetera. 

And of course he'd tried to talk about Hickey, too, because no matter the strangeness of the situation it still was hardly polite to spend all night on the subject of oneself. But Hickey was a subtle mastermind of a conversationalist, always managing to steer things infuriatingly back out of John’s control, avoiding anything but the vaguest of references to his own past, the days he’d spent as a living, breathing man. 

“I’ve heard noises at night from his room,” Ned was admitting now, “from across the hall. Like he’s having nightmares, maybe, but I don’t think so.”

“And that’s with the other strange things happening still,” George added. “Problems with the lights, windows, doors…” 

“He thought that was all me,” said Sol. “Pulling pranks, like a schoolboy.”

“I never believed that, I hope you didn’t think I did,” said Ned seriously. 

“You’d’ve been in your rights to,” said Sol, “but thank you, all the same.”

Ned was silent for a moment. “George,” he said, “do you think it might all be connected? John’s…troubles, and your ghost theory?” 

“Could be,” said George. “Could very well be.” 

“So you believe in them?” Sol asked, a bit incredulously. “Ghosts and that? How have you come by that belief?” 

“Well,” said George, “I was seven years old, staying with my aunts in Oxfordshire, when one night they sent me to fetch something from the attic—“

“Short version, George, please,” Ned sighed. 

“—I’ve seen one before,” George finished, guiltily. 

“Hm,” grunted Sol. A thoughtful silence ensued. 

“Hold on,” Ned said eventually, “Couldn’t it be one of those, you know, not ghosts exactly, but the junior version, the kind that only knocks stuff about a bit?” 

“A poltergeist, you mean,” said George. “Comes from the German. ‘Noisy spirit’ or ‘noisy ghost.’ They’re often thought to be the manifestation of a single person’s distress, with a resident serving as either a magnet for, or a genuine source of, negative spiritual energy.” 

“Now you’re saying it might be coming from  _ him?” _ Sol said. “From John? His subconscious?” 

“It would make sense,” George said. “He’s a dear, but rather….you know. Troubled.”

“And that could clear up why he doesn’t believe it, why he hasn’t said anything,” Ned said, thinking aloud. “Eye of the storm! He can’t see it, because it’s him  _ causing _ it, right?” 

John closed his eyes and gritted his teeth, leaning his head back against the wall. 

If he told them, he’d have to think about what to say first. 

If he thought about what to say, he’d have to consider what he knew. What he’d seen. In doing so, he would have to acknowledge the truth of it to himself.

And the second the words left his mouth to tell the others, he’d be forever branded, forever marred: proven once and for all to have been in the wrong. His entire view of the world he lived in would crumble for the second time in his life, after so long spent building it back up in a way that belonged to himself and himself only.

It was unbearable. He couldn’t do it. There, he’d decided! He could figure this out on his own, nobody else had to know, surely not… 

He sighed, and opened his eyes again. 

In front of him in the corridor was a familiar glowing figure. Silently, Hickey floated before him, top hat and bloody shirt and trademark smirk and all. Then he drifted past, as if making to enter the kitchen and join the conference at the table.

“No!” cried John. It had to be on  _ his  _ terms, Hickey couldn’t just get the scoop on him, show him up in front of everyone— there had to be  _ some  _ parts of his own life that he still controlled—!

John bolted for the kitchen, tripped, fell, and landed flat on his face. 

When he peeled his head from the floor, Hickey was nowhere to be seen. Just a table full of flatmates, staring in silent bewilderment at this outlandish entry.

“John,” said Ned, quickly standing. “Are you alright?”

“Were you—listening?” George said, clearly embarrassed.

He and Sol moved to join Ned, standing cautiously around John as he clambered shakily to his feet and leaned himself against the kitchen counter. 

“I’m fine,” he said, rather unconvincingly, eyes darting side to side, confirming the ghost was nowhere to be seen.

It was one thing for Ned and George to be looking at John with deep concern, but the addition of Sol to the mix, his arms folded and his brow furrowed, made the sight far stranger and more oppressive.

“John, what is going on?” Ned asked. 

“You don’t have to tell us if you don’t want to,” said George helpfully, which earned him a glare from Ned. 

John avoided looking at Sol. If he caught sight of a skeptical expression on that face now, he’d surely falter, and he was determined to get it out in the open before he could change his mind, 

Staring at a spot on the mottled kitchen wall over George’s shoulder, John spat it out.

“I’m being haunted,” he said. 

Ned glanced at George. George glanced at Ned. 

“There’s a ghost in my bedroom and his name is Cornelius Hickey and he’s been dead since 1848 and he won’t leave me alone until he—until he—” 

John didn’t manage to finish his sentence. George caught him as he staggered forward with a cry, and delivered a few tentative, nervous pats to his back before standing him up straight again.

“Alright, that’s it,” said Ned sternly, and pulled out his phone. “I’m calling the ghost hunters,  _ now.”  _

❧❧❧

They were late, which didn’t make any sense to John. He sat at the kitchen table, drinking tea while rain began to fall outside, at first light and then quite heavy as a winter storm rolled in, soaking the untamed bramble and overgrown hedges of the back garden.

What kind of ghost hunters were late? They weren’t  _ busy,  _ surely, they couldn’t possibly get more than one call a week. John refused to believe the informed citizens of modern London partook of such improbable services regularly.

At last, as evening began to fall, the doorbell rang. Ned was the first up to get it, with George and Sol following close behind. John hung back in the corridor, and watched two strangers come in from the gale. 

“Thank you both so much for coming on such short notice,” said Ned, “and on a Saturday, and in this weather, too—here, let me take your coats.” 

The taller figure, formerly encased in a shiny brown raincoat, was a young man about their age, narrow-shouldered with a head of dark curls and a beard to match. He wore a white button-down shirt and a skinny black tie, and thick glasses with black frames.

From inside a massive fur-lined parka next emerged a slender woman, with black hair in two neat plaits and a pair of interesting dangly earrings. She was immediately a far more intimidating presence than her partner, whose rosy-cheeked glow John suspected was not due to the weather, but was in fact congenital.

“It’s no problem at all. Edward, wasn’t it? We spoke on the phone. I’m Harry Goodsir,” said the man, shaking Ned’s hand. 

The woman introduced herself as Silna Ellis, but she stopped short of extending her hand, instead swiveling to look over her shoulder, as if she’d heard something nobody else had. 

“You,” she said, pointing past George and Sol, right at John. “You’re the one.”

“Silna’s a psychic,” explained Harry, as John quaked under her dark-eyed regard. “You are the afflicted party, yes?”

John could only nod weakly. 

Ned showed them all into the front room, Harry lugging a large wheeled case behind him and setting it down on the rug in front of the coffee table.

“So you’re…really ghost hunters?” John asked, simply trying to establish some command of the situation, as if it were a new climbing route full of unfamiliar holds.

“We prefer paranormal investigators, actually,” Harry said.

"Don’t listen to him,” Silna said, “ghost hunters is fine. And way cooler.” 

From inside the case, Harry removed a strange piece of equipment. It was about the size of a large tablet, but much more bulky, covered all over in switches and knobs, with antennae and odd circular receivers extending from each end. 

Ned and George gazed on curiously but calmly; Sol looked deeply skeptical; John fidgeted; and Silna’s face flickered with an amused smile. 

“Alright,” Harry said, giving John a meaningful look. “Are you ready to get started?”

❧❧❧

1. The other two: Floating, saying “boo.” Hickey did the former as a matter of course, but thought the latter rather gauche and so refrained.↩

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 👻 [The joke that started it all.](https://twitter.com/areyougonnabe/status/1283055742447042565?s=21)
> 
> 👻 Silna Ellis = L.S. = Lady Silence
> 
> 👻 Sorry for using the phrase “ghostly anus.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> added a dubcon tag! see endnotes for details

It was a dark and stormy night. 

It was also a waning crescent moon, and Venus was in Libra, and somewhere across London a man named Francis Crozier was scrolling drunkenly through the Instagram feed of his infuriating new coworker, but none of those things were known or relevant to John—unlike the first-hand fact of the thunder booming outside, rattling the creaky windowpanes of the flat’s front room and setting his teeth on edge. 

When lightning flashed a second later, it illuminated the front garden and backlit Harry’s mess of curly hair, which gave him the momentary aspect of some kind of scientist, mid-experiment and very probably mad. 

“So what’s the move?” Sol asked. “Sit in a circle, hold hands, wait for the knocking on the walls to start? Might be hard to hear, with the storm on.” 

“Oh, good lord, no,” Harry said with a laugh, as though that were the most absurd idea he’d ever heard. He held up his odd machine, with its blinking lights and plastic switches; John noticed only now that bits of it were held together by bright pink duct tape. “This machine is calibrated precisely to pick up on energy signatures left by spirits trapped between worlds, and then record them for output and analysis. It can also transmit sub- and super-sonic signals, out of human hearing range, that we use to draw apparitions forth, provoking reactions that we can then observe in real-time.” 

“The technology has come a long way since the days of automatic writing, I see,” said George, clearly impressed. He took his glasses out from his shirt pocket, slid them on to eagerly examine the device more closely.

“Certainly,” said Harry, “but of course, the human element remains central to any proper investigation. Silna here will be the one who comes closest to touching the other side tonight. She has a natural affinity for vocal contact—speaking directly to the dead, that is.” 

“Well, I’ll do my best,” Silna said, “but really, it’s Harry’s box that’ll get you your money’s worth. That thing’s a miracle worker. He invented it himself, you know. He doesn’t like to tell people.” 

Harry gazed fondly at her, and she put an encouraging hand on his shoulder. Their rapport was easy, practiced, loving. John knew nothing about them other than their names and professions, but he didn’t need their life stories to see that the two of them had been at this for ages, partners in life as well as in supernatural investigation.

_ Ugh, straight people,  _ he thought, as something ineffable and romantic passed between the two of them—and then the bottom of his stomach dropped out.

_ But I wouldn’t think that—if I did, does that mean I’m—hold on— _

It hadn’t been a thought, he realized. It had been a voice. A familiar one, soft and low, right in his ear, so sinisterly subtle as to disguise itself as having come from inside his own mind. 

He whirled around, looking desperately about him, craning his neck up at the ceiling, trying to seek out the source of the invasive disturbance. 

“What is it?” Harry said, instantly alert to John’s odd reaction. “Did something touch you? Did you feel something, hear something?” 

John stammered, “I heard—now, just now, his voice, in my ear—”

Silna’s pen was poised above her notebook. “What did he say?” she said intently. 

“Er,” said John, trying frantically to think of a way to avoid repeating it out loud. He was sure if Silna kept looking at him like that, all steely authority, he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from blurting it out, and that’d be the end of him. 

By the grace of coincidence, he was interrupted by a discordant beeping from Harry’s machine. 

“Oh, there we go!” cried Harry jubilantly. “Look, Silna, it’s picking up an oscillation, already a category 3!”

“Shit, can you isolate it?” 

They began an excited conversation about frequencies that John could only half-follow, insofar as it referenced some kind of logarithmic scale. Harry extended one of the antennae on the machine’s corner, causing the box to produce a melodic squeal that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in one of George’s more experimental playlists.

“You’re sure these guys are bona fide?” Sol murmured to Ned, as Harry chased the signal around the front room, holding the box in turns aloft and then down low to the level of the room’s crumbling molding. 

“Of course I am,” said Ned. “I did my research. They had five stars on Yelp!” 

Silna had knelt down next to the television and was pressing her hand to the curved glass of the screen. Her eyes fluttered closed, and she stayed there for a second, her mouth moving soundlessly, before she rose and went to confer with Harry as he continued his detecting. 

“Have you been experiencing disturbances in this room, at all?” Harry asked John, coming back over. His manner was so kindly it was almost off-putting— John felt that Silna’s solemn approach was far more appropriate to the situation at hand than Harry’s seemingly inborn twinkle, which might’ve been at home in a primary school classroom. 

John looked to Ned for reassurance; Ned gave him an encouraging nod. 

“There was….yes, we’ve been having problems with the television,” John confirmed. “Channels switching, it turns on by itself sometimes… and, er, things… coming up on the screen that shouldn’t be.” 

Silna took all this down in an impenetrable inky scrawl on her notepad. “Can you be a little more specific?” she asked. “What kind of things?” 

Surely it was too much to ask that Hickey manifest right there and then, twirling his mustache and giving a long-winded speech about his dastardly intentions, which Harry would record on his machine and then play backwards like a covertly-Satanic rock LP to reveal the specter’s secret weakness and the precise method of ridding John of his presence forever. 

Naturally, as John dithered, the room remained resolutely Hickey-free.

“It was pornography,” George finally offered, in a tone academic and clinical enough that John was spared the full-body embarrassment he might’ve suffered otherwise. “Homosexual pornography.”

“An erotic haunting!” Harry practically cheered in response. “Absolutely fascinating. I’ve always wanted to examine one up close. They’re quite rare, you know, really only one out of every hundred authentic spectral occurrences has a sexual element—according to my research, that is. This isn’t your everyday visitation.” 

“Naturally,” said Sol. “John isn’t your everyday man, is he, now.” 

“What?” John said. 

Having missed this exchange due to more messing with the knobs on his machine, Harry now held it up and said excitedly, “Based on these preliminary readings, there’s most certainly something here! You were quite right to call us in.” 

“Can you make it go away?” John said, unable to stop the question coming out as a fearful whine. 

“Too early to say,” said Silna. “On the phone, you mentioned the possibility of a poltergeist, Ned, didn’t you?” 

Ned gave a guilty nod, avoiding John’s eyes, and John willed himself not to be scared at the mere reference. Surely, this poltergeist idea had no merit. Surely there was nothing as rotten inside of  _ him  _ that could have produced as venal an apparition as Cornelius Hickey. John had been good. He  _ was  _ good. 

“In that case,” Silna said, “it’s a relatively simple fix, given that we’d be working with one easily accessible and willing nexus point—that’d be you, John.” 

“And if it’s not?” Ned asked. 

“If we are indeed dealing with an individual departed soul, this Cornelius Hickey fellow,” Harry said, pronouncing the name with a keenness that John hardly felt it deserved, “then we’ll need to put him to rest. Depending on the factors of his death, the paraphysical conditions of his manifestation, any tangible rituals or remnants tying him to the house, that process could take any number of forms….” 

It was all a bit much for John. He rubbed at the bridge of his nose, a motion that soon decayed into a full face-in-hands cradle, before at last he breathed in deeply and opened his eyes again. 

“Have you gotten all you can in here, Harry?” Silna asked. Harry nodded. “Great,” she said. “Let’s check out the rest of the house.” 

“Have fun, lads,” said Sol, and proceeded to flop down in his habitual pose on the sofa. 

A jealous twinge ran up John’s spine. How could Sol possibly be so relaxed? There were literal  _ ghost hunters  _ standing feet away from him, for God’s sake. He’d probably only brought up John’s strange behavior to the others in order to put John to shame. Obviously it wasn’t as if he actually believed in or cared about what was happening. 

Leaving Sol behind in the front room, the remaining residents trailed behind the experts like a fleet of ducklings, heading down the corridor to the kitchen. 

“So… do you get much work, these days?” asked John, trying to word it as politely as possible. 

“More than you might expect,” said Harry with a sheepish smile. “We’re generally booked weeks in advance.” 

“We actually would’ve been out in Croydon tonight, had your friend not offered double our usual rate upfront,” Silna added. 

John had not considered the fact that Ned had already paid, let alone paid a great deal, and felt a swell of affection for his friend. This was followed by a secondary surge of gratitude for his friend’s bank account, which, given how little time Ned spent outside the office, rarely was called upon for any use other than rent and takeaway. 

Ned currently wore his default mien of low-level concern, leaning against the doorframe with his hands in his pockets; John caught his eye and managed to pass along a grateful nod, which Ned acknowledged with a matter-of-fact shrug, as if to say:  _ Of course, mate.  _

“And it helps that we’re one of the only  _ real _ supernatural investigation companies around,” Harry went on, as without preamble he mounted one of the kitchen chairs to stick his machine against the mysterious stain on the ceiling above the table. “Most of our so-called competition are hacks—no offense meant to them, of course. But for those suffering legitimate spiritual disturbances, they’ll very often find their way to us, after others prove… ineffectual.” 

“It’s like, who you gonna call,” said Silna with a grin and a twirl of her pen.

John frowned. “Um. You, I guess?” 

“Ghostbusters,” Harry clarified amusedly, climbing back down.

“Oh,” John said. “I haven’t seen it.” 

The kitchen yielded little in the way of evidence; what Harry thought at first might have been ectoplasm turned out to be remnants of yet another of Sol’s repellent mealtime concoctions, smeared over the countertops. 

“Tastes like… tomato,” Harry said, and then wrinkled his nose. “With a hint of…vanilla?” 

John wondered if he went around tasting unknown substances found at every ghost investigation, and if that had ever backfired on him, but refrained from asking. 

They took more measurements and recordings and notes in George’s bedroom and the first floor bathroom. When Silna pressed her fingertips to the mirror, where remnants of flaky red pigment were still scattered after a poor cleaning job, she wrinkled her nose. 

“Just a real bad vibe,” she explained. Harry nodded sagely. 

Going past the front room again on their way to the stairs, John couldn’t help catch sight of Sol, resplendent in his oversized hoodie, bare feet kicked up on the coffee table as he smoked a cigarette (indoors, despite John’s repeated admonitions) and tapped at his phone. He was texting someone, sticking his tongue out just a tad as he typed, a kind of focused determination John had never seen him embody before. 

Unbidden, a vivid memory from the party rose up in John’s mind eye, overlaying Sol where he sat on the sofa—that too-young friend of his, all pliant and eager, like putty in Sol’s broad hands—and a rush of something sharp and hot that must have been disgust filled him at once. 

“John?” called Harry, from the landing up above. “Are you coming?” 

“Yeah,” John called, tore his gaze from Sol, and ascended the stairs.

When he arrived in his bedroom, he found Harry crouched beside his bed, passing the machine underneath it, calibrating and recalibrating it as it chirped rhythmically.

Ned was in the tattered armchair in the corner, sitting on his hands in what had to be a bid to prevent himself from checking his phone, gazing askance at Silna. He seemed suspicious of her, but not disrespectfully so, more as a manifestation of his chronic pessimism than anything.

Meanwhile, Hodgson was fluttering around like an overwhelmed albino bat. He was one of the most respected post-grads at his university, but out of the staid and structured realm of academia he did often demonstrate a tendency to become vulnerable to all sorts of psychological upsets. He was clearly fascinated by the investigators’ methods of operation, and at this point in the process must have been bursting with inquiries, trivia, half-remembered narratives, and off-the-wall postulations, which only his respect for John’s suffering and the methodical process of the investigators prevented him from verbalizing. 

John wanted to tell him he could go, that he and Ned both could, in fact; that neither of them had to bear witness to what was sure to become a sordid affair once Silna spoke directly to Hickey and learned, in living color, of what the creature had been doing to John. 

But at the same time, he had to admit that having them there was a selfish kind of comfort. They’d been through plenty together over the years—the various breakups and sackings, misadventures and accidents that were part and parcel of one’s twenties in the city—and what was all this, if not just another calamity in a long line of them? 

Letting his machine lead, Harry now made a beeline for the bathroom. Upon moving past the sink he stopped abruptly, then put out a hand, passing it back and forth over the toilet bowl. 

“There’s a cold spot,” he said, “right here. Can you feel it? How long has it been here?” 

“Oh,” said John, “right. Yes. Not long, I don’t think.” 

The bathroom was where Hickey had followed John, just last night, floating right through the door that John had slammed uselessly closed.

Hickey had drifted across the tiled floor, cornering John until he had no choice but to sit, clothed, on the rim of the toilet, while Hickey straddled him, close yet not touching, he wouldn’t touch. The great gaping wounds on his chest, bloody crevasses through which his unbeating heart glistened darkly, were all John could see. 

But it was better than the bed, at least; it made a sick kind of sense that such degeneracy would happen in the same room where John pissed, and shit, and scrubbed his skin after climbing till it was red and raw. 

“You don’t have to do this,” John had said, in as calm and kindly a tone as he could muster.  _ Grace,  _ his addled head was prompting,  _ you must show him grace…  _

“Of course I don’t,” laughed Hickey. “I don’t have to do  _ anything.” _

“Just because you’re dead, doesn’t mean you’re free from—” 

“Oh, Jack,” Hickey said. He was the only person who’d ever called John that—a serious child from the off, nobody had ever thought it proper to give him a nickname, he’d been John all his days. “It’s not because I’m dead. It’s because I’m a man, with a mind of my own, just like you. You don’t have to do anything, either. You’re free. We both are. That’s what I’m trying to get you to understand…” 

The power of this speech was somewhat diminished by Hickey’s ongoing handling of himself through his trousers, yet his words had still been rattling around John’s head ever since, jostling for place with all the other grotesquely memorable things Hickey had said and done, like a list in a database being constantly re-indexed. 

Harry had gotten out a little black case and was removing from it a pair of glasses, ancient-looking oval spectacles, with lenses tinted a deep sapphire blue. He put them on and inspected the mirror through them,  _ hmm _ -ing and  _ ahh _ -ing, apparently seeing things that had been invisible before.

George’s curiosity at last won out over his propriety, as from the doorway he inquired, “Harry, what are those?” 

“An artifact I recovered from a case in Edinburgh,” Harry said. “They’re the only pair of their kind in the world, I believe. The composition of this blue glass allows mirrors seen through it to act as visual portals, so to speak, into the spirit world.”

He took them off and passed them to George, who, with some trepidation, slipped them on. 

“Oh my god,” he breathed, jaw falling open. “Look at that! John, you’ve got to see this—!” He took the glasses off and passed them over.

When John put them on, it was almost like looking at the room underwater: as if the whole flat had flooded somehow, or been sunk to the depths of a cold, dark seabed. The room was a deep, aquatic blue, with slow ripples oscillating through it like waves. 

And there in the mirror, as promised, he saw it: the iridescent trail, exactly the color of the subtle glow that illuminated Hickey’s ghostly shape. It wound through the room, wrapping itself around the tub and the toilet, and within it the dark form of John’s own silhouette was visible, solid and dense and stable among the striated fluorescence of Hickey’s meandering path. Even in such an abstracted state, John could see the cower in his own shoulders, the way his every muscle strained, holding himself back, stopping himself from lifting a hand to Hickey’s face, brushing a thumb gently against that cold cheek—

John tore the glasses off almost immediately and shoved them, with a shaking hand, back towards Harry, who folded them up carefully and replaced their case in his bag. 

When John exited the bathroom, he realized that the storm outside had grown even more intense since they’d come upstairs. The bare branches of the great birch in the front garden were whipping back and forth, as if they were in pain, and the wind screamed to match. 

Silna gave a wordless nod to Harry, who seemed to parse it easily as a full sentence. “Alright, John. If you’ll just come stand here…” he said, beckoning John forward and positioning him squarely in front of Silna. 

“Since you’re the only one the spirit has made contact with, I will be using you as a conduit,” she explained, and placed two solid hands on John’s shoulders. 

“A-alright,” stammered John. 

“Cornelius Hickey,” Silna intoned. “I call to you. Speak to me, from where you are.” 

Beside her, Harry expertly slid a fader on the side of his machine higher and higher; no sound came out, but the light above it blinked quicker and quicker, and John remembered what Harry had said about special frequencies to draw the spirit forth.

The only sound for a moment was the rain, beating against the windows and the eaves, and John’s heart, thumping loud in his ears.

Then a massive crack of thunder shook the entire flat, concurrent with a bolt of lighting so close by that for a moment John thought it had hit the flat itself, and shortly they would all be engulfed in flame. Perhaps that would be preferable to Silna making contact with Hickey.

With a great  _ POP!  _ the electricity failed, and the room was plunged into blackness. Only the blinking green and red diodes of Harry’s machine were visible to orient John in space. 

John’s bedroom in darkness had become associated with nothing but fear, these last nights. He expected Hickey to loom out of the black at any moment, aglow with malice, his cock probably already in hand and ready to proceed with his particular brand of debauchery. 

But then there was light: George had brought out his phone flashlight, and Ned quickly followed suit. Illuminated by the cold glow of the strong white LEDs, Silna looked almost like a ghost herself.

She was shaking her head now, brows drawing together, mouth parting slightly in what could have been surprise, or pain. 

“Is there something wrong?” John asked. The last thing he wanted was for these innocent people to suffer at the hands of the very ruthless deviant who’d been torturing him. “Is he hurting you?” 

That was one of the few thoughts that had comforted him—that if Hickey was obsessed with him and him only, then that meant others were spared the ghost’s attentions. But if he set his sights on Silna or Harry, John didn’t know if he could forgive himself for being the cause. 

But Silna smiled, shook her head, her eyes still closed in deep focus. “Just trying to get through to him,” she said. “He’s being a little bitch about it.” 

John breathed a sigh of relief. Of course there was no way someone like her could be in any way really affected by Hickey’s malice. He was weak, and he was worthless, and Silna was nice and smart and competent and being paid an awful lot of money by Ned to know exactly how to deal with this problem. 

Really, it was just like a normal extermination. A perfectly sensible course of action. 

(At their last place, before the eviction, he’d seen the rats swarming in the cellar, their beady eyes glinting, a hungry mass of vermin in the dark.

Only afterwards had the exterminators revealed how deep the rot ran, the place contaminated with deadly toxins, baked into the structure. 

Perhaps he, like that place, had always been unsound, always one wrong move from ruin. Being touched only once with a soft, chilly kiss by the man who haunted him was not the beginning of his contamination, but the end: the final straw after years of decay.)

“Mr. Hickey, how did you die?” Silna said, and then, when she seemed to receive no answer, cleared her throat and tried again. “Mr. Hickey, my name is Silna, and I want to help you. But you have to  _ talk to me.  _ How did you come to be here? Were you wronged? Were you bound?”

In the darkness there was a loud thump, followed by Ned’s distinct yelp, the light from his phone going out as it fell to the floor, like something had hit him—John wanted to turn and see and help but Silna’s hands were still on him, and her eyes bore into his, and he couldn’t move. 

In his peripheral vision he saw his laptop, open but asleep on his desk in the corner, burst into life, displaying a writhing mass of pale flesh, mouths and genitals and sticky skin.

His bedside clock radio fuzzed into life and began blaring, a song he used to love but which now caused his stomach to churn:  _ Yes I swear it's the truth, and I owe it all to you... _

“Stop it,” demanded Silna, and the window sash flew open with a bang, bringing a gust of freezing wind inside, and a spray of cold rain that splashed John on the face. 

“Why are you doing this?” Silna shouted. Harry’s machine was going wild, screeching and wailing above the  _ thump-thump-thump _ of books flying off the shelves and landing on the rug, the flushing of the toilet, the mounting volume of the music— 

With a hum and a zap, the lights flickered back on, and the chaos ceased immediately: the radio fell silent, and the laptop went dark again. 

Silna dropped her hands from John’s shoulders, visibly winded.

Looking around, John saw Ned and George, both half-soaked by the rain that was still coming through the open window; Ned’s hand was clutched in the front of George’s shirt, and George had his arm tight around Ned’s shoulder, looking about five seconds from jumping into his arms. 

John quickly walked over and slammed the window shut, then leaned back against the frame, taking deep, steadying breaths.

“This Hickey of yours is a…stubborn fellow,” Harry said slowly. He seemed somewhat less ebullient than he’d been at the start of the evening, subdued by the intensity of the encounter. “I wasn’t sure from the out, because you see it so rarely, but…it seems as if he might’ve  _ chosen  _ to linger between worlds just for the thrill of it.” 

John didn’t have time to examine the feeling the phrase _this Hickey of yours_ had brought up in him before Ned said, incredulously, “Is that allowed?” 

“Allowed?” repeated Silna, bewilderedly. 

“I mean,” said Ned, “what are the rules? Can he  _ do  _ that?” 

Silna shared a disbelieving look with Harry. “There’s no paperwork, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said to Ned. “You don’t have to get a permit to become a ghost.” 

Ned began to protest, but George gave him a jab with his unnaturally sharp elbow and he shut up—but not before mumbling something that very well might have been, “Well, you  _ should.” _

“At the very least, I think it’s safe to say we can rule out a poltergeist at this point. A display like that could’ve only come from an independent entity, and the readings bear it out,” Harry said confidently, to which John could only offer a weak and grateful sigh. 

They broke for tea; Ned begged off to deal with the notifications that had built up on his phone while they’d been upstairs, promising to return when they resumed, but John told him he didn’t have to worry about it. 

George lingered for a moment longer, but in a miraculous moment of social grace seemed to realize John needed a moment alone with the present company, and took the opportunity to likewise graciously depart. 

Hickey hadn’t whispered it all straight to Silna like John had feared, which was good, but they still didn’t know all they ought to, which was bad. If there was some little secret they could use to banish him, hidden deep in his madness, it was John’s responsibility to provide all the information he could.

Trying to be as technical and objective as possible, as if he were George lecturing on Cornish verb tenses, John told the ghost hunters about Hickey’s methods and, as far as he could tell, his motivations. 

Harry’s round eyes managed to get even rounder as John went on. “That’s… oh, dear, John, I’m very sorry,” he said. “You know, a malevolent entity with such clear intentions, and such abilities—the skin-to-skin contact, I don’t know if I’ve ever catalogued such a haunting, it’s fascinating!”

The man did seem like he was genuinely trying to give active reassurance, but his bedside manner was more than a bit lacking, leaving John to feel more like a specimen in a glass box than a human being with a serious problem _. _

What was much more heartening was the matter-of-fact way in which Silna was taking it all down in her notebook. “This is all very helpful,” she said, when John was finished at last. “Thanks for being so honest.” 

“Do you know if anyone took video of that night?” Harry asked hopefully. “The karaoke, I mean. I was hoping to get some visual records tonight, but there’s been no luck so far, besides the mirror, which I couldn’t capture directly… there’s a chance I might be able to isolate a frame or two in a digital video file.”

John promised he’d find out—he had a strong feeling that Charlie Des Voeux might have obtained something of the sort, for his large and ever-growing collection of blackmail material—and Harry eagerly dug out a business card from his bag so John could have his email. 

**_Peace Descends  
_ ** Supernatural Investigation & Elimination, On Call   
_ Harry D.S. Goodsir & Silna Ellis, Proprietors _

  
  


A long, loud rumble of thunder rang out as John pocketed the card. He watched the lights nervously, but this time, they didn’t so much as flicker. Silna cleared her throat.

“Okay,” she said, and gave Harry a meaningful look. “I think we’re ready for the next bit.” 

“Are you going to do an exorcism?” John asked, wringing his hands.

“We refer to them as eliminations,” said Harry, “since ‘exorcism’ carries certain religious implications we prefer not to be associated with.”

This came as a great relief to John, who wasn’t quite sure what he would’ve done if they’d gotten out a Bible at that point.

“But no,” Harry went on. “Not yet. There’s too much we still don’t know—if we made a wild guess as to how to eliminate him now, it might backfire. Give him more power, or bind him even tighter to the house, or to you.”

“He’s already embedded very deeply in this place,” Silna explained. “Structurally, there’s a lot at stake.”

Harry retrieved a large zippered kit from his case in the front room and they went up the stairs, assembling in front of the door to John’s room. 

“We’ll need some fluids from you,” said Silna, entirely businesslike. 

“Fluids?” repeated John stupidly. Inside his head, Hickey leered at him, taunting cheerfully:  _ You’ve let it all build up, haven’t you? If you let me suck you off, you’d come and come all over yourself, practically flood the room. All that lovely spend, saving it for me, and when I finally get my hands on you, I’ll wring it out of you for hours, I’ll bathe in it…  _

“Er,” he said. 

“Oh, not blood!” Harry said, with a sheepish grin, thankfully misinterpreting John’s discomfited air. “Traditionalists will insist on its superiority in all manners spiritual, it’s true. But biologically speaking, for our purposes, saliva will serve the same purpose. Or tears, for that matter, but we’ve got no plans to make you cry, if we can avoid it.” He held out a vial full of a clear, slightly lavender-tinged liquid. 

John nervously spit into the vial, which Harry then capped and shook. The substance inside turned to a pastel, opaque yellow, possibly the least supernatural color John could have imagined.

“We can take care of it from here,” said Harry. “This bit is pretty boring.” 

“No, no, I want to watch,” said John, who didn’t fancy the idea of lingering downstairs in Sol’s domain and facing his mocking inquiries while the professionals pranced around his bedroom. 

Harry placed two candles outside the door, and chalked a series of symbols into the peeling paint around the doorframe. Silna lit the candles with strange red matches, all the while softly singing under her breath, a meandering melody with what sounded to John like nonsense lyrics. 

Similar fortifications were erected inside. It was all nonsensical to John, and seemed flimsy at best, though Harry assured him that there was much happening that he couldn’t see, nor could Harry for that matter: energy flows and spirit meshes and ethereal nexii and such. 

Harry placed a series of engraved metal discs on John’s windowsill and poured out the yellow liquid into a small glass bowl, which he set under the bed. Meanwhile Silna stood in the middle of the rug, deeply focused, her hands extended slightly out in front of her, moving slowly, as if she were casting a spell, or perhaps weaving something—John was reminded of the cats-cradle games his sister used to play, one of the few frivolous amusements tolerated in the house. 

They finished by wrapping red strings lined with beads made of what looked like bone around John’s bedposts, and then Harry dusted off his hands, surveying their handiwork.

“Now, this is all only a temporary solution,” said Harry, “but it should be more than enough to hold the manifestations in abeyance until we return.” 

“As part of the package Ned paid for, we’ll analyze all the data from tonight, conduct historical research, and present you with a final elimination strategy by midweek,” Silna said. She might as well have been John, giving a client on the rundown on migration and scalability for a new database. 

“... you guys do packages?” John asked. 

“I still think we should’ve just gone with a flat fee,” muttered Harry, as he stowed the gear. 

“Tiers are just _ practical,  _ honey, _ ” _ said Silna, “you’ve got to let people mix and match,” and they segued into a comfortable, bickering sort of argument, the type they could have put a bookmark in some months ago and picked back up like no time had passed at all, leaving John feeling an odd mix of exclusion and envy as he followed them down the stairs.

❧❧❧

For Solomon Tozer, there was nothing that distinguished Wednesday from any other given day of the week. Long gone were the regimented 24-hours of military life; absent, too, were the rhythms of caring for his mother; and he was left with nothing but the games on his phone, the channels on the ancient television, and the sense, a familiar weight at this point, that nothing new or good would ever happen to him again. 

He’d put off signing up for a new gym by telling himself he could save money by exercising outside, but he knew very well the weather was liable to remain shit for weeks, and he couldn’t afford weights to replace the set he’d had to leave behind in Liverpool. 

And it was no help at all that John’s misguided attempt at reform had stuck in Sol’s head, echoing round and round in heavy rotation. 

It had felt good, real fucking good, telling the prick off like that, standing in the cold and just bearing into him like he’d been aching to do practically since moving in.

And witnessing what followed, John’s red-faced devolution, followed by that ridiculous display, had been the cherry on top. The man was no better than anyone, once he was plastered, once he was brought down from his high horse. 

With the stick up his arse dislodged temporarily Sol had very nearly found John handsome, because sure as anything he could’ve been: sweet-faced and scruffy, with a fine singing voice, and, after that, an expression of sheer mortification that suited him well. 

Sol had wanted to shake the hand of whoever’d thought to pop on that porno—but nobody at all would admit to it afterwards, not even Ned’s doll-eyed mate who looked the type to have that kind of good taste. 

Ned hadn’t thought it was funny as he had, naturally. But Sol didn’t consider himself to have much of a conscience, at least not the kind that had dogged Ned heavily as long as Sol had known him. 

Sol didn’t consider himself much, period, never had. Made things easier, not to. More fun, too. But having to explain himself like he did, having to wrap it in a neat storytime bow for John, had made the sum of it all come into sharp, nasty focus. 

And now, despite himself, despite the fact that he bloody well knew he didn’t owe John a thing, didn’t owe anyone a thing, only owed himself the work it took to stay afloat, he’d found himself worrying. That he really  _ was  _ an imposition. That Ned, darling Ned, really was a pushover of the worst sort, doing Sol no favors in letting him stay. 

He couldn’t give John the satisfaction. He wasn’t even right, besides. Ned was doing him a deep kindness, one he hardly deserved. There was nothing weak about it.

“Christ,” he muttered. Why was he still thinking about this? It was half one and he’d not left the sofa except to piss; he’d best get some coffee in him, otherwise the whole day would be more of a wash than it already was. 

He yawned, stretched, hauled himself up off the sofa with a grunt, and wandered to the kitchen.

It was as deserted as the rest of the house: Ned was at the office, George was lecturing, and John, in a brighter mood than Sol had ever seen him in, had sauntered out into the morning chill, with the unlikely proclamation that he was out to get groceries, and thought he might do some cooking later.

As Sol brewed his coffee and fixed himself up something ostensibly resembling a meal, his mind wandered to the events of Saturday night. 

Those two, the ghost hunters, they’d been odd, sure enough—but a settled, happy sort of odd. 

Clearly, Ned and George had been all of a mind, believing that John really  _ was  _ being haunted by a dead pervert, and not just suffering a particularly inventive mental break. 

And sure as anything that machine of Harry’s had been lighting up, and there had been that oddness with the power going out, and Sol had overheard crashes and yelps from upstairs, then later that strange murmuring about eliminations and protections and tiers. 

All the same, Sol couldn’t quite get his head around it. Maybe for good reason, though—it was right that someone around here stayed canny. John was certifiable, George was a nitwit, Ned was as dopey as he’d ever been. So maybe Sol, solid and reliable, would be called upon to take care of things, if they got strange again. Step up to the plate, and be the one to lead John through his troubles—and perhaps be rewarded for it, too, though what form that might take Sol hadn’t the faintest idea. 

If John were really so obsessed with Sol finding some way to occupy his time, maybe he’d not mind Sol turning the tables on him, trying to get  _ his  _ head in shape, get him to a place where Sol could tolerate him. Ned thought he was alright, after all, so there had to be  _ some  _ redeeming factors, deep down, that Sol could try and dig up, wrench out, use whatever tools he had at hand, like loosening a rusted bolt… 

All this, he mused on as he ate, and was still idly dwelling on when he wandered back into the front room, with vague plans to try texting Tommy again, though his heart wasn’t really in it.

He was very glad he’d left his bowl on the kitchen table. If he’d had it in his hands when he came back into the front room, he would’ve dropped it, shattering it on the hardwood. 

Standing— _ floating— _ in the middle of the front room, smiling like the devil, was a dead man. 

“Well, well, well,” said Sol. “You must be Cornelius Hickey.”

In the explanatory gibbering that had been coaxed from John as Sol and George had sat with him in the kitchen on Saturday afternoon, acting as a two-man tea delivery system while Ned rang up the Ghostbusters, nothing whatsoever had been made about the actual appearance of the man’s ghost. From the way John had spoke of him, Sol had pictured a horrid, hulking thing, all teeth and claws. Surely only something truly grotesque, real or imagined, could have such an effect.

As it turned out, Hickey was smaller than expected; delicate, even, far from the beast that Sol had come to idly picture. 

Beneath the pale blue-green glow that enveloped his form, Hickey was dressed smartly in an old-fashioned outfit, waistcoat and watch-chain and all. His navy tailcoat, cinched at the waist, displayed his slim figure finely; black cloth around his neck gave the impression of an elegant, graceful neck. 

Despite these vintage trappings, Sol had the strange but immediate impression that if you put Hickey in a v-neck and joggers, he could be just another hipster on the street, hair up in a half-bun to show off his AirPods. 

Maybe it was just that he didn’t seem at all out of place in the front room, that he fit far more seamlessly in amongst the worn but well-built furniture, the delicately carved molding and the wide bay window, than Sol himself did. 

Sol was a stranger in this city still but the figure before him seemed like London itself come to life, every story of Jack the Ripper in a dark alley, every Dickens drama and Sherlock Holmes mystery rolled into one. He belonged.

Bobbing lazily in the air, in a manner that brought to mind the fronds of a palm tree gently moved by a tropical breeze, he said, “Don’t be so casual, Solomon. I can see the pulse jumping in your neck. You’re terrified. As you ought to be.” 

Sol shrugged. Hickey was bluffing—if Sol happened to be scared, there was no way the ghost could tell. He’d been trained better than that, hadn’t he? 

Hickey sat down in mid-air, perching himself comfortably on a chair Sol couldn’t see, right beside the sofa. Sol wondered if a chair had been there when Hickey was alive, if somehow his ghost-self still moved through the world as it had lived when he did. 

Did he see gaslights, still, when he looked out the windows of the house? If he walked out the door, would it be into a long-dead world, cobblestones and costermongers and soot-faced beggar boys? 

He had taken out a cigarette and was lighting it now, and Sol sat down on the sofa and watched, utterly fascinated by the sheer mundanity of the motion, the modernity of it, how Hickey could have been any of his friends on a night out, leaning against a wall outside the pub. 

Hickey reached out, offering the smoke to Sol, but he was too lost in thought to respond right away: by the time he considered the offer, Hickey had seemed to recall something, drawing back and taking another drag himself. 

It was odd. The way John had spoken about Hickey, as if he were a monster, plain and simple, seemed to preclude any kind of inner life. But Sol saw, clear as anything, a flicker of genuine hurt in Hickey’s face as he leaned away, a mournful little moue that spoke volumes; not only about the ghost in front of him but about the man he haunted, upstairs in that neat bedroom.

“Is there something you want?” asked Sol. “Can’t lend you money, if that’s what it is. Do your lot have your own shops, or do you use the barter system?”

Hickey chuckled, scratched at his pale beard, and then leaned forward conspiratorially. “Have you ever been kept out of a place where you knew you rightfully belonged?” he asked.

Sol thought of a door slamming in his face, tugging further open a wound still fresh and bleeding, and leaving him stranded and hopeless, and nodded.

“Then you’ll understand my predicament,” Hickey said. “That young filly and foal who came to call. Did you see what they did, upstairs?” 

“I wasn’t paying attention.” 

“Right you are,” said Hickey. “You didn’t miss much. Utter amateurs, and awful conversationalists besides. It was a neat distraction, I suppose, but once they’d come and gone I had the unfortunate realization they’d actually managed to do some damage.” 

“I’m sorry to hear it,” said Sol. “But I don’t see what that’s got to do with me. I told you, I wasn’t paying attention. I wouldn’t know the first thing about what they did, or how to stop it.” 

“I want your body,” said Hickey. 

“Come again?” 

“Your body, Solomon,” said Hickey. “Not forever, mind. But they’ve locked me out, just as I was finally making some progress with young Mr. Irving. Set up a system of—let’s call them gates, that I can’t get past.” 

He looked sourly up at the ceiling, in the general direction of John’s room. “You can do, though,” he said, returning his clear, flinty gaze to Sol. “You could walk through that door, right now. Lie down on his bed, give his pillow a good sniff for me.”

“That what you want me to do? Perv on his bedlinens?”

“A family used to live here, for a while,” Hickey said, apropos of nothing, stretching out in his invisible chair and motioning at the room around them, “five, ten years ago maybe now. Three little brats, running amok, screaming at all hours. There was only one film that would calm them all down, at the same time. Wasn’t much else to do, so I watched along. The fellow at the heart of the story had a way about him I came to admire. Determined. Inventive. Adaptable. And he had a trick he did, which I happen to have the capacity for as well. He could take control of his friend, hidden away, direct his movements like a conductor.”

Sol said, “... are you talking about  _ Ratatouille?”  _

“Yes! That’s the one. You’ve seen it? So you know, then, that the principle is simple. I take control of your body. Possess you, you might say. Protected by your physical form, I can reenter John’s room, which will have the effect of rendering the wards null and void. Once that’s done, you can be off on your merry way, and me on mine. Never the twain shall meet again, if that’s how you prefer it. I’m sure you have plenty to be getting on with,” he added, gesturing magnanimously at Sol’s surroundings, encompassing the menagerie of empty cans and bottles on the table, the pile of dirty laundry below it, the luggage he’d been living out of for the past month in the corner. 

“What’s in it for me?” Sol said, crossing his arms.

“Good boy,” said Hickey. “Asking all the right questions, look at you.” 

Sol bristled. “I’m not going to let you—bloody  _ Ratatouille me— _ without some kind of idea of how it’ll end up. Dunno what nonsense John’s put in your head about me, but I’m not an idiot.” 

“If that’s so, you’ll understand when I say: I’m trying to fix him. Your mate John—” 

“Not my mate.” 

“It’ll make your life better,” Hickey said, with an easy, salesmanlike insistence. “He’d stop breathing down your neck. He’d be kinder. He’d treat you better—he’d treat Ned better. He’s in his head too much, isn’t he? Afeared of all: his future, his past. You. His own prick. His own heart. It isn’t right, a pretty boy like that so reduced. Don’t you agree?” 

Sol was silent, drumming his fingers on the arm of the sofa. 

Hickey went on, “And it’s  _ my  _ house, besides. I’ve more of a right to every room in this place than you do. You’re a guest here in more ways than one.” 

“Yeah,” said Sol, “sure.” He came off more skeptical than he actually felt. Because it was a funny thing—he’d just been thinking along those lines, hadn’t he? How nice it’d be to have a John around that had loosened up a bit, treated him like a person instead of some kind of Trojan Horse of life-threatening promiscuity and intoxication. 

“If you want me to make it worth your while, I will,” Hickey said. He stubbed out his cigarette in mid-air and pocketed it, tipped his head in a birdlike manner. “I’ll make it fun. That’s what you need, Sol. A little fun.”

Sol didn’t move away as Hickey stretched out a hand, placing it on top of his own where it lay on the arm of the sofa. 

Hickey’s hand was quite cold; solid as anything, yet Sol could still see through it to his own knuckles beneath. He felt the temptation to shut his eyes at the impossibility of it but resisted; forced himself to consider it, to trust his own sight.

Then he looked up into Hickey’s face which, close up, was not nearly so darling as it had seemed at a distance. It was an old, old face, underneath that rosy, puckish youth. His eyes, like glinting chips of silver, were wintry and hard, all the warmth gone from them. 

It must be a damned lonely life, being dead. Sol, all at once, was gladder of being alive than he had been in months. He felt his heart beating and was grateful for it, and wasn’t that strange?

“What do you say? Are you in?” Hickey asked. “I need you, Sol.” 

Sol had certainly never been the curious type. He didn’t often try new things just for the hell of it. He knew what he liked, and how he liked it. 

So it was pity, maybe, that led him to it. Pity or boredom or perhaps even apathy—his year had already been so strange, this might as well happen. 

Certainly it was not loneliness, or at least that’s what he told himself, that caused him to tip his head up, beckoning with a nod that was almost a challenge,  _ come on, show me what you’ve got.  _ Hickey floated closer, and closer, and then he was kissing Sol, a triumphant and hungry bite of a kiss, then—

It was like falling through thin ice, landing in frigid water and feeling every nerve go numb at once before alighting again, buzzing with almost painful sensation. 

Sol felt filled to the brim, saturated and overfull, as Hickey’s very being poured into him, occupying his every nerve. Like one whole country being squeezed into the borders of another. His head was full of color and noise, his limbs spasmed and jerked, and for a second—a moment so swift, and ended with such haste he knew it had to have been a mistake, he saw a memory which was not his own flash before his eyes. A man he didn’t know—not Hickey, but a sickly, gaunt stranger with a haunted gaze— 

And it was done. 

Sol could only compare the sensation to watching a film, from the very back row in the cinema: the world was projected very distantly before him, a passive viewing experience. He could sense Hickey, further forward in his head, looking out of his eyes as if they belonged to him. 

“Oh, fuck,” said Sol, or at the very least he tried to. Instead it rang out inside his head as a thought:  _ Oh, fuck.  _

His arm lifted, though it was not him doing the lifting. He watched his fingers flex, hand turning this way and that, then felt his neck and shoulders do a kind of gentle stretch and roll, as Hickey settled in. 

“You’re very comfortable, did you know that?” Hickey said. Perhaps stranger than the sensation of Sol’s jaw and tongue moving on their own was the sound of Hickey’s voice issuing from his mouth, the slightly higher register, the new precision of the consonants, the shift of the vowels some thirty miles north-east, by Sol’s ear. “Just like this lovely big sofa you spend so much time on.” 

Sol’s hand roamed, under Hickey’s control, up to his unkempt beard, then down the front of his stained t-shirt, to land at last on the swell of his stomach, caressing it with an almost loving affection that would have made Sol cringe, if he’d had the power to. 

“Oh, dear. You’ve not been taking care of yourself!” he said, almost sweetly. 

_ Shove off,  _ said Sol stridently.  __

“You’re right, of course, you’re right,” said Hickey. “Not my place to judge at all.” He ran a tongue over Sol’s teeth, tapped it experimentally against his palate; stuck two fingers in his mouth and gave them a good suck. The sensation was… _ interesting.  _

Then his hand wandered back down, this time past his waistband, to land purposefully on where his cock lay, quiescent between his thighs. 

It was inevitable, really. Sol realized he’d known this was going to happen the very moment he’d agreed to Hickey’s mad plan, and found he didn’t much mind. He was excited, even—that was clear enough by how he felt himself stirring under Hickey’s investigations.

He hadn’t felt a hand but his own for ages. Dear old Eddie took his passes as jokes, annoyances to be fondly tolerated—things had ended so neatly and squarely between them, and so long ago now, that the thought of any resumption of their relationship was comical in its unlikeliness. The boy was all business now, a far cry from the shy, cuddly lad who couldn’t leave Sol’s cock alone for a damn day. 

And Tommy had seemed well interested at the party but at the end of the night had gone off with someone else, one of the boys from Ned’s work, and now he was stringing Sol along maddeningly over Whatsapp and it was all rubbish, so really Sol was alright with whatever  _ this  _ was. More than alright, even. 

“May I?” asked Hickey now, a courtesy Sol had not expected. 

_ Yeah,  _ said Sol.  _ Go on.  _

Why not? After all, he’d had himself off right here on this sofa nearly every night since he’d arrived. At first it’d been solely for his own benefit, a comfort and a refuge from everything he was running from. 

But at a certain point he’d come to the reluctant understanding that when he began to fist his cock in long, sturdy pulls, lit by the glow of the ancient television, he’d been doing it with the vague hope of being watched, perhaps from between the bars of the banister; he imagined that ashamed gaze on him, the heady glimpses John might let himself steal before fleeing back to his room, where he’d try and keep his hands off himself while he thought of Sol’s cock, seen only in darkness and at a distance. 

“Very nice,” said Hickey, grasping Sol through his shorts and boxers below, feeling him fill underneath his touch. 

There was confidence in Hickey’s investigation, and a flattering eagerness too. It was a kind of intimacy Sol had no priors for whatsoever; who could have? The ghost in control of his hand had it wrapped around his cock now, was handling it in a way totally unlike Sol did himself. 

But Hickey did know what he was doing, that much was clear; and Sol could feel the ghost’s arousal seated right alongside his own, an impossible doubling that heightened the sensation beyond anything he’d known. Sol would have let his eyes drift closed by now but Hickey was keeping them open, forcing Sol to watch through that multiplied haze of pleasure as he brought Sol off.

Sol ached to move his hips, fuck up ever so slightly into his own hand, to tighten his grip as pressure built low and urgent at his root, but Hickey wasn’t interested. Instead he drew it out, luxuriating in each stroke, slowing down just as Sol wanted to speed up. 

When he finally came, it was with a dual outburst: his usual low huff, confined to a subvocal thought, and Hickey’s softer, higher exhalation, heard aloud. 

He felt Hickey try to push against the syrupy resistance of his climax, which tended to linger longer than most guys’— something he’d only ever allowed Ned to tease him for. 

_ It’ll take a bit,  _ he said, through the haze.  _ Just relax.  _ It was probably useless to tell the wiry, insistent creature currently inhabiting him to relax, but worth a shot. Finally, Hickey let Sol’s body flop down on the sofa, allowed his breathing to stabilize. 

After Sol directed Hickey to the tissues and had him clean up to his satisfaction, after which Hickey tucked Sol back into his pants with care and a cheeky little tap, they got up off the sofa and began to rove about the room.

The sensation was a curious one: it was somewhere in between being puppeted and being compelled. Sol had the unshakeable impression that if he really, actually wanted to, if it were life or death, he could wrest control back from Hickey and expel him through mere exertion of will, which was a comfort. In the meantime he was content to keep to himself, and let things run their course. 

Hickey seemed overjoyed to be embodied; he even did a little dance, stomping Sol’s feet in a rhythmic patter on the rug in front of the television. He lifted Sol’s head to the window and looked out through it, and Sol felt an idea occur to the ghost, like a little white spark bursting in his peripheral vision. 

“What would you say to a turn about the garden?” Hickey asked. 

_ Don’t have much choice in it, do I?  _

Hickey’s walk was different than Sol’s, his posture too; as they strolled out the door and into the front yard, he thought how stupid he must have looked, a form that usually either loped along instead capering lightly about.

_ How’s the view?  _ he asked.  _ Bit like wearing high heels for you, isn’t it?  _

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” said Hickey. He walked them around the garden, inspected the brown, leafless bushes, ran Sol’s hand along the railing of the fence, picked up a twig from the ground and snapped it in half experimentally. 

Sol had been lazing in a t-shirt and shorts, and he was freezing now, but Hickey didn’t seem to notice the gooseflesh popping up on Sol’s arms and legs as he stretched himself out, extending Sol’s arms in a grand spread, like a yoga pose.

_ Should’ve put on a jumper,  _ Sol groused,  _ aren’t you cold?  _

Hickey didn’t respond except to let out a hum as he lifted his face to the sun. It was a weak glow through thick gray clouds, but Hickey basked in it, soaking up the cold light like he was a green shoot of a plant, bursting through the soil in springtime. 

It was nice, Sol supposed. Bit of a mitzvah, like taking his mum on those long walks round the park, just to get her out of the flat. 

“Oh, hullo, Sol,” said George. He’d come up through the gate, pink-cheeked underneath his garish scarf and bobble-topped knit cap, the combination of which made him look even more elfin than usual. 

Hickey gave George a wave, making use of Sol’s hand to do so. “George,” he said, and Sol felt Hickey’s impudent grin seat itself incongruously on his face.

“Are you off somewhere?” George said, looking with bewilderment at Sol’s under-clothed appearance. 

“I’m just getting some fresh air,” Hickey said, launching into a Scouser accent so wildly mediocre that Sol let out a mental groan. “I’ve been spending an awful lot of time inside. It’s not good for the lungs.” 

George blinked, once or twice, as if he were noticing something off or odd about the whole situation. Sol would have tensed up, if he could have, but Hickey seemed utterly unfazed by the non-zero likelihood that George, paranoid and prone to jumping to the most unlikely of conclusions, might actually manage to land upon what was actually happening here. 

Finally, George asked, “Did you get a haircut?” 

Hickey laughed. “I did not, but it’s about time. I look a bit like a mop, don’t I?” 

“I suppose,” George said, his brows drawing together in mild befuddlement. Then he reasserted himself, nodded to Sol, and headed towards the door. 

Once George had disappeared inside the house, Sol hissed,  _ What are you playing at?  _

“Just being friendly. Can’t a man say hello to his housemate?” 

_ …Do I really look like a mop?  _

“Did I say that? Of course not. You look lovely.” 

Sol was prepared to punt the little bastard out of his body like a regulation football if he so much as made a move for the garden gate—he did  _ not  _ want to be spotted being piloted down the block by anyone from the neighborhood—but thankfully Hickey seemed to be done with his little outing, and now darted back up the steps towards the door. 

Once inside, they ascended the stairs, heading for John’s room. Sol had only been upstairs one time, and that was just to fetch Ned’s fancy metal water bottle for him while the man dealt with something complicated related to work, pacing in the kitchen; he’d glimpsed John’s room through the open door, smirked at the fussy neatness of John’s made bed, the drawers of the filing cabinet visible next to the desk—who had a  _ filing cabinet  _ in their  _ bedroom?  _

The door was closed now, with strange figures drawn onto the wall around it. Candles burned on the ground below, and Sol felt Hickey quail from the sheer force emanating from the door and the room beyond it, like—well, like a rat backing away from something that was clearly a trap. 

But protected by Sol’s bulk around him, Hickey was able to move forward, reach out and grasp the doorknob with Sol’s hand, turn it and shove it open and walk straight through.

Crossing the threshold felt like the snapping of a great piece of elastic, loud and forceful and instantaneous. Nothing visibly changed at all—the candles still guttered gently in their red holders—but whatever invisible workings had been set up to keep Hickey out, they were gone now, unraveled into nothingness. 

_ Are we done here?  _ Sol said. 

“No, I don’t think we are,” said Hickey. He took them over to John’s closet, and immediately began rifling through the clothes carefully hung up inside. 

_ Dunno if you should be doing that,  _ said Sol, but he didn’t move to exert control, didn’t make a move to stop Hickey from this invasion. He remained passive as Hickey ran his borrowed hands reverently over John’s things, as if they were precious gems, and not a row of nearly identical Topman polos.

Hickey moved to John’s desk, and began going through the drawers. Eventually he dug out a nondescript photo album, which he flipped through, picture by picture. 

They were photos from uni; the three flatmates, their hair long and unkempt, bottles in hand, laughing and dancing. John was bright-eyed and gleeful, his grin loose and his posture looser. 

Sol had seen some of these photos before on Facebook, years ago when they were first taken; back then, they’d brought up odd flashes of impotent envy, towards these new mates of Ned’s who got to spend all day with him, they didn’t  _ know  _ him like Sol did, never would. 

But he didn’t feel that now, not at all. Or rather, he did, but a strange obverse of the original impulse. Instead of being directed at the lads crowded around Ned it was directed at Ned himself: that Ned had got to know that side of John, that he had gotten to know him before he got lost in himself, let his past eat up his present.

Sol was jolted from this reverie by the sound of footsteps behind him. Hickey heard too, and dropped the album back into its drawer, sliding it closed with Sol’s arse as he turned around. 

John was standing at the threshold, looking absolutely furious. “What are you doing here?”

❧❧❧

Sol didn’t look nearly as abashed to have been caught with his hands in John’s personals as he ought to have been, although such a lack of reaction shouldn’t have surprised John. The man obviously wasn’t capable of feeling shame. 

“How was your outing?” Sol asked innocently. 

“It was nice,” John said shortly. “Can I help you with something?” 

“Perhaps,” said Sol. 

Which, what was that supposed to mean? 

“Well—I’ve got to get some work done now, actually,” said John, pointing at his laptop. 

Sol seemed not to take the hint—well, more likely he’d taken it, and then elected to ignore it. Instead of leaving, he took a seat on John’s bed, looked up at John with a sort of irrepressible glee that only further stoked his infuriation. 

He seemed unusually interested in the fabric of John’s sheets, rubbing them over with his broad hands. “Sit down,” he said, patting the bed next to him. 

John did so, for reasons unclear to him. He ought to be grabbing Sol by the neck of his grubby t-shirt and hauling him back down to his squalid little nest— 

“You did a brave thing, letting those investigators come,” Sol said. He sounded utterly sincere. 

“Oh. Well, you know,” said John, running a hand through his hair, “it was Ned’s idea.” 

“Worth it?” Sol asked. 

John nodded. Yes, it had been worth it. He was free. 

“Good,” said Sol, and then laughed, though John wasn’t sure if he understood the joke. 

“It’s so stupid,” John muttered. “He wasn’t even—he wasn’t even  _ real,  _ not really.” 

“Do you believe,” Sol said slowly, “that only someone _real_ is worth getting that worked up over? Someone—alive?” 

John frowned. “I mean,” he murmured. “Yes. I think so.” 

“Well,” Sol said, “I’m real. I’m right here. How about it?” 

This close, John had expected Sol to smell awful, like sweat, smoke, stale food. But he didn’t: he just smelled like Sol, rough and warm and  _ good;  _ sweet, even, because he did love his sugar, and John could smell it on him, like something baking in the oven. 

John didn’t know whether to scream or run or cry out, though in the end it didn’t matter, as all his limbs had seized up the second Sol laid a hand on his thigh. 

This couldn’t be happening. Sol  _ hated  _ him, didn’t he? He wanted nothing to do with him—his type was sad-eyed and long-lashed and handsome, not uptight and ridiculous and  _ boring  _ like John— 

And yet. 

“Let me,” he said, and John nodded mutely, mouth held tightly closed, for if he opened it he didn’t know what would come out: an apology or a confession or a broken sob. 

Sol went to his knees, went for John’s fly, went for John’s cock and drew it from his briefs with a worshipful exhale. “I  _ knew  _ it,” said Sol. “I knew you had a beauty in there. Good Christ but this is a beast you’ve got, and hardly used—!” 

John wasn’t thinking about it, he wasn’t, he  _ wasn’t.  _ Even as Sol took him into his mouth, even as he dug his fingers into Sol’s unwashed hair, he most certainly wasn’t thinking about how these last few nights, his room utterly absent of anything resembling a ghost, he’d found himself getting hard at dreams of Hickey’s whispers, Hickey’s fine, proud cock in his own expert hand, floating ghostly before John in the dark. 

He absolutely wasn’t thinking, now, about how Sol sucked at him in exactly the ways Hickey had described, the ways that had haunted his waking hours, leaving indelible impressions in his imagination that no amount of programming could erode. 

He was all loving tongue and expert pressure, and the slightest, gentlest scrape of teeth that shouldn’t have felt good, but it did, it absolutely did.

“Oh, Jesus,” John moaned, his hips jerking forward, and Sol took him in deeper as if it were easy, though the few times John had had this done it hadn’t seemed like it possibly could be, not with John being the size he was—but that had been with girls, small and shy ones, and Sol was bigger, he could take him, he fit him just right, absolutely perfectly. 

John’s mouth, loosened by that bit of blasphemy, was now letting forth with a stream of nonsense. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, sorry,” he was babbling in apology—for what, exactly, he didn’t know—but Sol just clutched his calves tighter through his trousers, the touch grounding John in the moment, sending sparks up his skin to settle deep in him. He didn’t want it to end, but it felt too good and it had been too long, he’d tried so hard not to—

“I’m going to—please, I’m going to—” he tried, but he didn’t finish his sentence before he was coming in endless ugly, messy jerks down Sol’s throat, and Sol was swallowing hungrily, taking all of it. 

When the world resolved itself around him again he was lying back on his bed, his cock softening against his skin. Sol’s face was right above him and he was smiling serenely. John couldn’t help but smile back, closing his eyes as Sol’s fingers swept softly through his fringe.

“You did well, Jack,” said Sol, a gentle whisper, “you did so well,” and John’s eyes fluttered open to look up again, and Sol was coming closer as if to kiss him, and in his gaze John saw now a tell-tale glint of silver-blue where there should only have been warm hazel, and—

He’d called him Jack. 

_ “You!”  _

❧

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter warning: Hickey possesses Tozer, and then gives Irving a blowjob while Irving thinks it's Tozer the whole time. SPICY
> 
> ❧❧❧
> 
> 👻 Tommy went home with Hartnell, by the way. It's what he deserves! 
> 
> 👻 The Ratatouille reference is dedicated to the one and only [vegetas.](/users/vegetas)
> 
> 👻 Next chapter is the last chapter! It'll be very long probably but I said 4 parts and by god I meant it!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> one last HUGE round of applause for [ktula](/users/ktula) and their incredible beta skills ❤️
> 
> extra thanks to Poose for being the greatest cheerleader anyone could ask for, and everyone on twitter and discord for indulging me in this ridiculous romp! 👻

“Well, that went down like a lead balloon,” Hickey mused. 

“Oh, will you shut up.” 

Sol felt absolutely wretched. There was the tingling ache in his limbs, all that remained of Hickey’s presence after Sol had ejected him with great force; the strain of his cheerfully neglected cock against the waistband of his shorts; the lingering taste of John’s come in his mouth; and finally, the throb of his right eye where John’s fist had connected, immediately after flinging Sol off the bed with a cry. 

The sound of the door slamming behind John as he fled still rang in Sol’s ears. He was sprawled now on the rug, leaning against John’s bedframe with his bare legs prickling in the chilly draft whispering through the poorly-sealed window. 

“You know, looking at the man, you wouldn’t expect him to pack that kind of strength,” Hickey said. He was floating cross-legged before Sol, a few inches off the ground, as innocently and comfortably as a child, or some kind of enlightened guru.

“He does rock climbing,” muttered Sol, wondering as he did when it was that he’d even learned that. He wasn’t fond of the idea that his own head was keeping secrets from himself. What else was there about John that he’d not noticed he’d been noticing? 

“Before he laid you out, though,” said Hickey, “you must admit, he was performing marvelously. Folded like a house of cards in a light breeze, didn’t he?”

“That was out of line, Mr. Hickey,” Sol said, in his most disciplinary tone. 

Instead of having the decency to look abashed, or, God forbid, apologize, Hickey laughed. “You’re telling me that wasn’t something you wanted? I was in your _head,_ Solomon. I felt what you felt. Your desire. You’d been looking!” 

“He thought I was _you,_ ” Sol said, shoulders hunched up close to his ears in his habitual defensive pose. 

“Well, you were,” said Hickey. “Quite the deduction! I was very proud of him—he’s finally starting to be able to see the things staring him straight in the face.” 

“But— I mean, I wasn’t—” Sol began, and then fell silent, unsure of where precisely he was planning to take his argument. 

He looked unsteadily at Hickey and noticed: the ghost was so _pleased._ Some of the coldness of his face, the spectral inhumanity of it had melted away, leaving a sated contentment that suited him well. In the failing afternoon light through the window he seemed almost cherubic. 

“You enjoyed it, _”_ said Hickey. “Quite intensely. Don’t start denying things now, Solomon, not when John’s finally getting around to stopping.” 

Any illusions of his own guarded unknowability had disappeared the moment Hickey entered Sol’s body. With his knowledge of the inside of Sol’s head, as well as his demonstrated powers of observation, surely Hickey was seeing the flickers of his own satisfaction mirrored in Sol’s face, no matter how Sol tried to hide them. 

Yes, Sol had been looking. But it wasn’t as if he’d actually planned to _do_ anything on his own. The thought was ludicrous in the extreme. It would have taken someone absolutely mental to actually try and get inside the trousers of John Irving, he of the top-collar button and the filing cabinet and the anchoritic devotion to self-improvement. 

Someone like Hickey—and therein lay the problem. 

If hadn’t been for Hickey’s madness, Sol would never have known what it felt like to suck John off, and that was the long and short of it. He never would have brought himself to that tipping point, never would have bothered to turn on the charm. 

Now he did know, though, and he’d never be able to forget it, because the ghost had taken him there. Once there, though, Hickey had gone too far. His confidence had spilled out of the boundaries of his borrowed body going in for the kiss like that, and the whole thing had collapsed magnificently. 

Gratitude and anger duked it out in Sol’s already roiling head, and he began to feel nauseous. On top of it all he felt a kinship with Hickey’s state that he couldn’t quite bring himself to be ashamed of. Wasn’t the ghost at loose ends just like he was? To not be able to touch, or breathe, or walk among the living—a sorrier state than Sol’s grey, grieving idleness, even. 

Except instead of sitting around on the sofa of the afterlife, so to speak, Hickey had actually _done_ something. Sure, it was absolutely insane, the kind of ridiculous plot you could only make up after spending a half-century watching Corrie over the shoulders of subletter after subletter—but it was _something._

It must have seemed to Hickey like John had been delivered to him like a gift from the universe itself, all wrapped up in ribbons. A pretty new toy, a Rubik’s cube of repressions and rules that practically demanded to be played with.

Sol could easily see how a man already half-mad when he died—as he suspected Hickey might well have been—and further decayed over the decades might fall straight into obsession over such a puzzle-box person, dedicating every undead hour to picking him apart. 

He remembered the line Hickey had used on John, the one that had had John melting, pliable, very nearly approaching eager. 

_I’m real,_ Hickey had said, using Sol’s mouth, Sol’s tongue, Sol’s voice. And Sol had watched out of the back of his own head as the last of John’s reservations had evaporated, at the thought of human contact offered willingly, no matter his hatred of Sol, no matter his flimsy commitment to heterosexuality. 

But whatever John might have wanted from him before, it was surely not something he could ever accept now, should it be offered again. Not now that Sol’s impulsive cahoots with Hickey had been exposed. It was all over before it’d even begun. 

“Now that we’ve gotten him primed and ready, d’you think he might finally let me—you know?” Hickey made a vulgar gesture.

“Fuck you,” Sol mumbled. He readjusted himself—his erection had done him the service of subsiding as the memory of John’s desperate, high-volume orgasm faded from immediacy—and staggered to his feet. 

He wasn’t sure what he would say to John—but whatever it was, it’d be better than sitting there and enduring the taunts of a randy Victorian for a minute longer. 

Stomping down the stairs brought him to the front room, where George was leaning back in the armchair watching Question Time, sipping daintily from a patterned teacup Sol had never seen in the kitchen cabinet before. Did the man keep his own set of private china? 

“Where’s John?” Sol asked. “I need to talk to him.” 

“Er, you just missed him,” said George, his eyes darting to the front door. 

“He left?” Sol felt strangely, intensely disappointed at John’s absence. What had he been expecting? To have some kind of dramatic scene upon the stairs, like in an old Hollywood film? 

“Yeah, he got a phone call,” George said. “Grabbed his things and vaulted.” 

“What? D’you know why?”

“It was the ghost hunters. I think they’ve found some kind of clue…did something happen to your face?” 

Sol had forgotten, momentarily, about John’s right hook. It was probably beginning to bruise now. “Fell down,” he said gruffly, and shuffled off to the kitchen. 

❧❧❧

“So we’re there, crouching over the grave in the pouring rain—” 

“—which we’d never have been able to find without Silna deciphering the cemetery map, by the way, absolutely mad the state they keep that place in, anything older than fifty years might as well have been bulldozed, so disrespectful—” 

“—and it was the strangest thing. The name on the headstone was right, but the psychic signature—” 

“—was _completely_ different! Not a match for what we picked up at your house at all!” Harry held up his iPad. John could see two diverging lines on a graph, one jagged and red marked with Saturday’s date, and another green and gently curving, dated yesterday. 

“Totally weird,” Silna said, shaking her head. “It was like the spirit had already settled, long ago, but we know that’s not the case!” 

The whole thing sounded like a wholly dreadful affair—a muddy graveyard in the rain, in which it all turned out to have been for naught—but the investigators, as ever, seemed to be nothing but cheery about the experience. 

The backseat of Silna’s compact electric Mitsubishi was mostly taken up by cases of ghost-hunting equipment, leaving only a tiny space for John to squeeze into. Harry of course had apologized profusely for the inconvenience, but John was just happy to be out of the house.

He’d nearly fallen to his knees in gratitude when the call had come in, his pocket buzzing not half a minute after he’d fled to the downstairs bathroom, leaning against the counter on shaking legs. One overpriced Uber ride later and he’d been climbing into Silna’s car—(“I don’t have my license,” Harry had admitted, abashed)—and they’d gotten on their way to Cambridge, where they were going to be let in after-hours by a friend of Silna’s to examine an artifact connected in some way to the life—and, hopefully, death—of Cornelius Hickey. 

The conversation had slowed to a lull, which John very much did not want, lest his mind start dwelling on certain events which had occurred in his bedroom earlier that afternoon. 

“If you don’t mind me asking,” said John, “how did you two get started? With all of this? I mean…it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing you come by through a job training scheme, you know.” 

“Oh, it’s a great story,” Silna exclaimed. “Harry, you tell it!” 

Without preamble, Harry launched into his tale. They had met at Cambridge—a fact which sent a dull, routine jolt of envy through John, which he batted away with a practiced mental hand—and their first case had actually very nearly been their last. 

Mysterious happenings in a soon-to-be-demolished operating theater on campus had drawn the attention of their group of friends, which had split down the middle as far as credulity. Silna was one of the believers, after a lifetime of personal psychic experience, and Harry one of the skeptics. He’d taken some mysterious recordings at the site with a jury-rigged prototype of what would later become his box, but he was still unconvinced. Silna dared him, as a joke, to spend one night alone in the empty building, but he’d taken her up on it in all earnestness, eager to impress her.

That night, Silna had been asleep in her dormitory when she’d awoken to the sound of a scream. It hadn’t come from anywhere nearby, and in fact had not actually happened yet: she’d had a dream, a premonition, of Harry being caught in a great inferno, a murderous maelstrom of spectral power. 

She’d rushed across campus, and arrived just in time. The violent spirit of the Victorian surgeon who haunted the place had cornered Harry in the desolate corridor, furious at being called forth so rudely by this bespectacled student.

“The apparition was like nothing I’d ever seen,” Harry said. “The sheer malevolence pouring off of him—it was terrifying. Even so, I pitied him. I could tell he was in a great deal of pain. I wanted to help, but I was…let’s just say, I was unprepared. He wasn’t just any ghost, though there was no way I could have known that at the time. He was an extremely dangerous elemental shade—fire, in this case. I was about ten seconds from being turned into a scorch mark on the wall when Silna arrived.”

Silna had shouted at the shade and it had turned to face her, all flame and fury, leaving Harry free to frantically fiddle with his equipment, finally landing on a frequency that weakened the dead doctor. Silna then did something she’d never done before, and had hardly known she _could_ do: using his name, she commanded the spirit gone from the mortal plane. 

Exhausted by the psychic effort, she’d fainted, but Harry had caught her, and laid there with her on the cold tile of the corridor until she recovered. 

“What we realized, of course, was that we couldn’t have done it either one of us alone,” said Harry. “It was my technology, with her words and power, that were together able to put Dr. Stanley to rest.” 

“After that, word got out,” said Silna. “We were doing maybe a few investigations a month throughout school, most of which turned out to be hoaxes, but the ones that weren’t acted as a bit of a ghost hunting crash course. After graduation we decided to go in on a website and business cards together, and—well, here we are!” 

“That’s… lovely,” said John. He supposed it was, in its way, though he wondered what story they’d told their parents when asked about their first date. 

The satnav burbled a direction which Harry immediately took issue with, leading directly into a round of exuberant, almost melodic arguing of the type John was coming to associate closely with the two ghost hunters. 

“So—this artifact,” said John stiffly, once the tiff had been resolved by the expedient application of a Google Maps check-in. “It belonged to—to _him_?” 

“The acquisition records aren’t in the best condition,” said Harry, “but according to our research, yes, it’s highly likely that it did.” 

“It was really a lucky find,” Silna said. “Thank god the Institute recently digitized their catalog, otherwise we’d have had no idea it was there!” 

“And you need all this equipment to…look at it properly?” John asked, shifting uncomfortably against the case digging into his hip. 

“It’s a fascinating process,” Harry began. “Silna and I have developed it ourselves, over the last few years. You see, all objects carry their history in a psychic matrix…” 

John wasn’t so much grateful for the long-winded, enthusiastic explanation that followed as for the headache it induced, which helpfully dispersed persistent and involuntarily recollections of certain actions of Sol Tozer’s lips and tongue. 

It had started to rain again by the time they arrived in Cambridge. John and Harry lugged a stack of three large equipment cases together to the entrance of a handsome brick building on the outskirts of campus, with Silna striding briskly ahead underneath her broad umbrella, toting one of the smaller ones.

They were met at the door by a grizzled-looking man, who, in a worn grey henley and jeans, hardly matched up with John’s aesthetic expectations for a Cambridge academic. 

“Silna!” cried the man, immediately enveloping her in a massive hug. “And Mr. Goodsir, the one and only.” He shook Harry’s hand respectfully. “How goes the specialty training?” 

“It’s wonderful,” said Harry. “I’m enjoying myself immensely—oh, sorry, I’m dripping all over the nice floor…” 

The man let out a truly astonishing laugh, more of a guffaw, really. “Drip away, lad,” he said. “It’s not me who’ll have to pay for the polishing.” To Silna, he asked, “And how’s my darling Mr. Teeth-and-Claws?” 

“He misses you, of course,” said Silna. “For some reason treats just taste better when you’re the one giving them, apparently. Can’t figure it out.” 

“And you never will,” the man said with a roguish wink. “Trade secret, that is. I’d ask you to bring him next time, but that’s a one way ticket to the destruction of half the books in my study, knowing him.” John decided they must be talking about a dog. 

Silna seemed then to remember, belatedly, that John was standing beside her, clutching the handle of the equipment case and shivering in his raincoat. 

“This is Dr. Thomas Blanky,” she said. “He was one of my professors here.” 

“One of your _favorite_ professors,” Blanky corrected, good-naturedly. 

“It’s nice to meet you,” said John. Blanky’s handshake was terrifyingly strong. 

“Anyway, kids, I can only give you an hour in here, as I’m due home for dinner, and have to lock up before I leave,” Blanky said sternly. 

“Oh, that’ll be plenty of time,” Silna promised. “We work fast.” 

Blanky showed them inside a disused classroom, with walls decorated in framed playbills for 19th-century entertainments and colorful fashion plate engravings. “I’ll fetch the doo-hickey in question, be back in a jiffy,” he promised.

Something occurred to John, watching Blanky disappear out the door and back down the high-ceilinged corridor. “Hang on,” he said. “He said—specialty training. Are you…a _doctor?”_

Harry looked at Silna guiltily. “We both are, actually.” 

“Well, not quite yet,” Silna said. “But yes—I’m in psychology, he’s in pathology. We were studying medicine together here, did Harry forget to mention that?” 

John was, for some reason, overwhelmed by this information. The fact that they could just….do this, this strange thing, together, and not care about what people thought of them, not have it affect their careers in any material way. The fact that they regularly faced down horrors like Hickey and seemed not only to come safely out the other side but intact enough to juggle it as a mere hobby alongside full-time medical training indicated a level of resilience John could only aspire to. 

He considered, not for the first time in his life, the idea that perhaps people who went to better schools than he were simply made of stronger stuff. 

Then, watching the two of them work together, silently and swiftly, to clear away the tables and chairs from the center of the room, a new corollary presented itself to John: maybe people who went to good schools _and_ went through life with someone by their side were always going to be better off. 

❧❧❧

Sol really had meant to bring it up right away. There was no reason why he shouldn’t have. Ned had arrived home far earlier than usual—which is to say, at a normal time to come home from work—and given that Sol had spent the preceding hours biting his nails over how to bring up the events of that afternoon, he had a spiel prepped and ready to go for the moment Ned walked in the door.

It would have started with a little something like: _So I maybe gave your roommate a blowjob,_ which would have been followed up by a quick and urgent, _while I was possessed by a horny ghost,_ and concluded with _but it wasn’t like he made me do it, it was kind of a group effort actually,_ and then they would have proceeded from there. 

But one look at Ned’s face when he appeared in the foyer had made the whole thing evaporate from Sol’s mind in a puff of urgent empathy.

And now he was sitting at the kitchen table, pouring Ned a cup of tea as he went over the events of that day at Erebus Logistics International PLC. 

Sol couldn’t quite follow the thread of it. There had been a cock-up, that much was clear, and it had involved the new hire in some way, or perhaps his absence at a critical moment, but in any case Ned had gone behind his back to give a stamp of approval to some time-sensitive, expensive personnel initiative. Crozier had found out after returning from an important meeting, which is apparently when the whole thing had gone to shit. 

“—and I said, I _said_ I was the worst kind of sorry, but he kept looking at me like I was a child _._ I swear, I could’ve taken a massive row, I could’ve taken HR getting involved, I could’ve even taken being sacked, I probably deserved it.” He buried his face in his hands. “But the quiet anger, the gentle condescension, I just wanted to run screaming, you know? I didn’t, though. I just stood there and took it.” 

“S’alright, Eddie,” Sol said, thumbing gently at Ned’s nape. Some would say he was in dire need of a haircut, but Sol certainly wouldn’t. The scruffy look suited much better than the neat corporate trim. 

“Really, it’s Fitzjames he ought to have been furious at,” Ned moaned. _“He_ was the one who wasn’t there! If he’d been at his desk instead of swanning about—probably taking one of his luxurious lunches, or putting more silk ties on the company card, or—or looking at himself in the mirror, I don’t know—none of this would’ve happened, I _know_ it—” 

Sol had never been happier in that moment that he’d never had cause to work in an office. It sounded absolutely hellish. 

“—and I could _tell,_ I could tell Tom thought I should’ve been throwing myself at Crozier’s feet, or right out the window, even—” 

“This Tom,” said Sol. “Your mate from the party? Pale as a sheet of A4? With the eyes, and the hair?” Sol made a gesture to indicate a swoop of dark, shiny hair across the forehead.

Ned blinked over at him, expression softening at the memory. “Yeah, that’s him.” Then he darkened again. “But he thinks I’m an absolute idiot now, after that showing.”

“Did he say that? Out loud, did he say that out loud to you?”

“Well, no…”

“So how d’you know he thinks it?”

Ned was already frowning, but his frown now deepened. “I suppose I don’t.” 

“That’s right. For all you know, he thinks you’re the bravest middle manager in the whole place, for doing what you thought was best, then apologizing when it came to it. Thinks you’re pretty, too, I’d bet.”

“...you would?” 

“I do,” said Sol. “Even though you’ve got nothing down there.” He swiftly dropped his hand from Ned’s neck to the top of his arse—such as it was—and gave it a playful pinch. 

“Stop it!” yelped Ned, swatting Sol’s hand away. “I don’t—Sol!” 

“It’s true,” said Sol. “There’s nothing there. It’s a vacuum. A void. You’re a void-arse, Ned, admit it.” 

“I’m not! You’re awful.” 

“Maybe that’s his type. You never know. Maybe Tom’s got a massive fetish for handsome blokes with black holes where their backside should be.” 

“Oh, come on!” Ned was laughing now, a smile shattering the agitated surface of his face, and it was like the sun had come out. Sol laughed with him, and by the time they fell silent, Ned was looking at him with such unfiltered gratitude that Sol couldn’t bring himself to crush it with any mention of what had gone on earlier. 

Instead, he clapped Ned on the shoulder and gave him an encouraging shake. “Let’s go out,” he said. “Forget about all that, Crozier and Tom and the rest. You didn’t die, and you’re not gonna, you’re fine, it’ll all be okay. What you need is a few pints in you, how does that sound?” 

Ned admitted that it sounded quite alright, actually, so Sol heaved him up from his seat, and out towards the door into the evening. 

❧❧❧

The collection of the Institute for 19th Century Life was, as John understood it, was a broad-ranging anthropological survey of domestic material culture during the Regency and Victorian eras. 

The archival tray Blanky had pulled for them was crammed with items, a farrago of well-kept antiques with no discerning theme other than their general age. Ivory pipes, glinting cufflinks, silverware and jewelry, all carefully tagged with their date of acquisition and catalog number. 

But in the center, as promised, was what they’d come for. A knife, bearing the name HICKEY on one side, scratched into the ivory handle; as Harry reverently lifted it out of the case and turned it this way and that, John read the name CORNELIUS. A shiver went down his spine.

“Can I….?” he asked. 

“Be careful,” said Harry, handing it over, and John narrowed his eyes. It wasn’t as if he was going to get possessed by the spirit of the knife and suddenly go postal and start stabbing. 

Actually, given everything that had happened, that scenario didn’t actually seem all that impossible—though this only occurred to John when the knife was already in hand. Thankfully, it sat inert and cold in his palm; he felt no rising urge to kill or maim, or even cackle evilly, even when he ran his thumb slowly down the engraved letters reading HICKEY. 

Harry fiddled with a heavily modified digital camera, attaching it to his duct-taped magic machine by means of a bunch of colorful cables. Silna meanwhile was stringing up familiar-looking beaded strands onto the backs of the chairs that ringed the cleared circle, explaining that she was preparing for the investigation by weakening the divide between the _here_ and the _there._ The difference between these and the strands she’d put up in John’s room to keep Hickey out, apparently, was that they’d been strung the opposite way round.

“So… what now?” asked John once they’d finished, handing the knife back to Harry, who immediately gave it to Silna. 

“There are a lot of things that might happen,” said Harry, unhelpfully.

“Such as...?” 

“Well, if the knife was in Mr. Hickey’s possession when he died, we might be able to gain some kind of insight into his murder,” said Harry.

“And if it wasn’t, but he carried it around for any length of time before, then we could still be able to summon an echo of him from earlier in his life,” Silna added. “It would be much better behaved than his actual ghost.”

“Of course, there’s a chance we’re looking at the murder weapon itself here,” Harry said. “In which case we might be able to call forth an image or vision of his last moments. Or the killer himself, even! Imagine!” 

John respected Harry’s commitment to being starry-eyed about the probability of meeting yet another vicious ghost, but he found he could not share in it in the least. He stood there picking at his cuticles while Silna turned the knife over in her hands, humming a strange, quiet song that set the very air of the room vibrating like a harp’s plucked string. 

Just like she had that night in his bedroom, Silna seemed to take on an otherworldly quality as she reached out to the other side. “The spirits that dwell within this object: I call you forth,” she intoned. “Show yourself!”

The fluorescent lights flickered, and a viciously cold wind swept through the room. At first there was sound, and then light, and then finally form, flowing out of the knife like a white mist that coalesced, slowly and deliberately, before them where they stood.

What emerged wasn’t a ghostly image of Hickey’s death, playing itself out like a silent movie—neither was it a diminished projection of Hickey himself, an “echo” that would have sweetly offered up the information they needed without a fight, as John had hoped for. 

Instead, it was a man. 

Whereas Hickey always had a certain anachronistic jollity about him, this person was probably precisely who John would have pictured if asked to conjure a mental image of “dead Victorian.” 

He was hollow-cheeked and sallow-skinned, with sunken eyes that looked like they had seen things more horrible than anyone currently alive could comprehend. 

Like Hickey, he wore a raggedy waistcoat over billowing white shirtsleeves, though he at least didn’t have great ugly rents torn into his chest. Looking at him John might have wagered that he’d died of starvation, or some horrible 19th-century wasting disease like scurvy or consumption—the trickle of blood from his mouth was the only hint that his death might not have been an entirely quiet one. 

“Who are you?” asked Silna. 

The spirit frowned. “I’m dead,” he said, in a voice much gentler than John had expected, a kind of sweet, feathery rasp. 

“Sorry for your loss,” said Silna brusquely, not really sounding sorry at all. “What’s your name? I’m Silna, that’s Harry, that’s John.” 

“Billy,” he said. “I’m Billy Gibson.” 

“Mr. Gibson,” said Silna, “if it’s not too personal a question, how did your soul come to rest in this knife?” She nodded down to the weapon resting in her palm. 

“That was the knife that killed me,” he said, sounding slightly surprised, as if remembering something he’d tried very hard to forget. “Oh. Right.” 

Silna’s face fell, and John’s heart gave an unsure lurch in tandem. If the knife’s psychic matrix was occupied by the soul of this murdered man, that meant it had likely left Hickey’s possession before he himself became a ghost. There’d be no clues to his death here; just another victim of his wiles. 

Harry gave Silna an encouraging nod. She held up the knife—Gibson’s outline wobbled slightly as she raised it—and displayed the name it bore. “You were killed by Cornelius Hickey?” 

John saw, as if in slow motion, Gibson’s expression change from pathetic to annoyed, passing through something ambiguously wistful on the way there. 

“Christ. Have you brought me back just to ask about _Cornelius?”_

“Well—” Silna began, but Gibson interrupted her before she could explain. 

“Wonderful,” he said. “It couldn’t be any other way. Surely nobody would ever really want to talk to Billy Gibson, just to ask how he is. Just to see if the afterlife is treating him right, or to let him know how his sister’s descendants are getting on, perhaps—no, it’s always got to be about darling Cornelius, hasn’t it?” He sighed theatrically. “Right, get on with it. What’s he done now, then?”

Silna and Harry looked now directly to John; the ghost followed their gaze and John felt the weight of three sets of eyes on him: two alive, one not.

John cleared his throat. “He’s been—haunting me,” he said. “At night. And during the day—whenever he wants, really.”

Gibson raised an eyebrow. “Sounds about right.” 

“He’s really—I mean, I understand he’s not got much else on, but he’s really taken it quite far,” John said. 

“Mmhm.” Gibson examined the buttons on his frayed cuff, not even bothering to meet John’s eyes now. 

“You know,” said John, suddenly incensed, “you could stand to be a little more polite, Mr. Gibson.” 

“Polite?” echoed Gibson, so deliberately neutral it came all the way around to mocking. 

“We’ll stick you right back into that knife in a second if you don’t cooperate!” John snapped. “How would you like that, then? Stuck in there, wearing the name of Cornelius Hickey on your cage for eternity?”

There was a hand on his shoulder: it was Harry’s, calming and warm, and John took a deep, steadying breath. He knew he mustn’t upset the spirit, lest they lose their chance at finding a way to stop Hickey, but all the same, there was something so strangely and personally offensive about Gibson’s manner, something that made John go red tip to toe and want to demand to be called _sir._

“Really, anything about Mr. Hickey you can tell us would be helpful,” Silna said to the ghost.

“You’ve met him,” Gibson said, gesturing to John. “So you know what he’s like. I don’t know if I’ve anything to offer.” 

“Where and when he was born, maybe?” Harry suggested. 

“I don’t know.” 

“How he died?” Harry tried. 

“After my time.”

“Weaknesses?” Silna asked. “Things he really really doesn’t like? Or, does like…?” 

“Let’s see,” said Gibson. He looked off and up to the side; his expression softened as he recalled: “His favorite color is red, he loves the _London Illustrated News,_ he’ll eat olives for every meal if you let him. Half his clothes are stolen, but the other half he saved up months and months to buy on his own. He knows his favorite penny-gaffs off by heart, but finds Shakespeare boring. He’s got a scar right above his left thigh he told me he got in a vicious street fight, but it looks more like a cat-scratch. How does that answer?” 

There was something John wasn’t quite fully comprehending about Gibson’s attitude towards his own killer, but he didn’t have the energy to spare getting his head around it now. He was still thrumming, full of anger with no outlet, at Hickey, at Gibson, at himself. “Please,” he said. “Just tell us how to get rid of him, will you?” 

“Get rid of him?” Gibson laughed, disbelieving. John felt intimately disrespected by that laugh. Gibson had no right to mock him, it wasn’t his _place,_ what did he know about what John had been through? “Oh, that’s a good one.” 

“I’m sorry?” John said. 

“Get rid of _Cornelius?_ You’re very funny.” 

“It’s not a joke!” John sputtered. “He’s been making my life hell, he won’t let me alone. If you can’t help us figure this out, I could be stuck with him _forever.”_

Speaking this aloud was the first time John had put into words a fear he hadn’t dared name: that no matter what he did, where he moved, how far he ran, Hickey would always be there, always be coming, waiting, watching. 

No—that wasn’t it, though, was it. The real fear was of his own conviction, rising despite his best efforts to sink it, that if such a thing happened, he wouldn’t even mind it. That it wouldn’t be that bad. That he’d like it, maybe, even. 

Gibson said, “That’s just the thing. You don’t get rid of Cornelius. He gets rid of you.” 

To demonstrate, he turned around, sort of a gentle rotating float in midair, and displayed what had been hidden from them before: the bloody wound in his back, red around the edges, with the stain spreading across the fabric of his waistcoat, a great dark vertical blot that, to John’s eyes, resembled an erect penis. 

“Ouch,” said Silna dryly. 

“You can say that again,” Gibson said, turning back around. “Anyway, why would you want to?” 

John blinked. “Get rid of him, I mean.”

“I—because he’s a murderous, deviant, insolent, utter prick!” John exclaimed. “He’s insane! I can’t believe _you_ let him stick around long enough to do _that_ to you!”

“You can’t?” Gibson asked. “I mean, I did try to stay away, but...” He gave John an intense look that swept him up and down like a barcode scanner. “You must know how it is, with him.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Has he not been showing you the old in-and-out?”

“I’m…sorry?” 

“Has he buggered you yet. Given you a seeing-to. Rogered you into kingdom come.” 

Silna burst into laughter, quickly muffling it in her jumper sleeve. Harry’s jaw dropped slightly open, and his glasses slid a bit down his nose. 

“I—no, I haven’t—I won’t allow it!” sputtered John. “I’d never—!” 

“Uh huh,” said Gibson. “Well, if you did, you’d understand. He’s very good at it, unfortunately. I’ve always been hoping to run into him, ever since, you know... I really thought he wouldn’t too be far behind me, knowing his lifestyle. I can’t imagine he died of old age, did he?” 

“He was murdered,” Harry piped up. “Quite brutally, it seems.” 

“Oh, good for him,” said Gibson lightly, and then sighed. “Well, if he’s stuck around up here, there’s no hope for me, I suppose.” He scratched at his neatly trimmed beard. “Enjoy it for me while it lasts, will you? There’s no sense trying to stay ignorant for long. Besides, no offense, you really look like you could use it.”

“How dare you!” John surged forward, making to seize Gibson by the neckerchief, throttle him or slap him or throw all his weight behind a punch, for the second time that day. 

Instead, with a feeling like walking through a freezing waterfall he pitched straight through Gibson’s incorporeal form, and, overbalancing, landed in a stunned, awkward heap on the carpet on the other side.

Silna rolled her eyes. “Okay, this is officially getting ridiculous. Have a nice eternity, Mr. Gibson. Bye-bye now.” She made a subtle gesture with her free hand, and Gibson’s sad, scrawny form was sucked back into the knife like so much fog into a high-powered hoover. John thought he saw him give a sad little wave as he went back in. 

The sudden absence of the spectral presence in the room left a strange ozone scent in the air, and an uncomfortable ringing in John’s ears. His headache had returned in full force and in addition he now felt slightly queasy. He really didn’t much feel like getting up from where he lay on the floor, but one judgmental look from Silna had him scrambling immediately to his feet. 

Harry, meanwhile, studiously avoided looking John in the eye as the three of them packed up the equipment and dragged the tables and chairs back into place. He nattered on about the quality of recording he’d been able to collect from the encounter, and the analysis he’d apply to it when he got home, and the potential for further explorations into the spirits associated with the Institute’s collection, if they could get Blanky involved somehow, et cetera. 

By the time they’d gotten out to the misty carpark and loaded everything back in, Harry had finally exhausted his supply of inanities. He fell silent, sliding into the passenger seat, but then suddenly gave a start, clapping his hand to his mouth as if remembering something important. “We forgot to ask why Hickey killed him!” he exclaimed. 

“I mean, it had to have been a lover’s quarrel of some kind,” Silna said, like it was obvious. 

“Really?” said Harry. “Well—it was clear they’d had— _relations,_ but knowing the socio-economic pressures of the era one might presume it was over money, or food, or lodgings. Perhaps something of value was stolen?” 

“See, that’s just enforcing modern conceptions of criminality and poverty onto people whose day-to-day lives existed within an entirely different structural context! Probably one of them cheated with another man.” 

“Well, I think there’s a possibility _you’re_ enforcing modern conceptions of sexuality and partnership onto people whose relation to identity was defined as much by expectation as by desire. In fact, there likely may have been a woman involved—” 

“Oh, absolutely _not!”_

They carried on in this manner until they had swung onto the M11. John, who had been musing in silence for a great many minutes on a great many subjects, and had finally come to a decision regarding one of them, cleared his throat. 

“Yes, of course you can stay with us tonight, John,” said Silna.

John gaped. Despite evidence of her prowess not an hour prior he’d somehow forgotten she was a literal psychic. 

“Why does he need to stay? Did something happen?” Harry said softly to her, but still loud enough for John to hear. 

John tensed. If she knew…if she’d known, this whole time, about what had happened, about why John couldn’t face going back to the flat tonight, and was about to say it out loud… 

But she merely shook her head sympathetically. “He’s scared, is all. And who can blame him?” 

Harry twisted around in the passenger seat to look at John, his kind face shining, all emphatic round-cheeked pity. “Oh, of _course_ you can stay!” 

John nodded gratefully. “Thank you.” 

“Would you mind if we trained my camera on you during the night? I have some hypotheses about the transmission of spectral energy across geographic lines in cases of individualized hauntings I’d simply love to get some insight into—” 

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” John mumbled.

“Wonderful!” 

“Oh, we do have a dog, by the way,” Silna said. “He hates everyone except us and Blanky, but you’ll be fine. Probably. You like dogs?” 

“Of course,” John lied. He disliked dogs. He was severely allergic. But compared to the alternative, he thought he would rather put up with the sneezes. At least until the morning. He’ll have sorted himself out by morning. 

❧❧❧

Sol had spent an enjoyable evening plying Ned with enough drink to get him talking and keep him that way. He’d successfully prevented himself from letting anything slip about Hickey or John, though as an unintended consequence of keeping his own silence the topic had naturally drifted back to Ned’s work, so Sol had ended up learning far more about an ongoing, highly-charged feud between two higher-ups at a logistics company than he ever would have chosen to under other circumstances. 

Come Thursday morning, he was severely hungover. In the usual course of things this wouldn’t have worried him, but now the thought of being in a weakened state of mind while Hickey still had the run of the place was not one he liked. If the ghost were to appear to him now and ask to repeat it all over again, he didn’t know if he would’ve had the strength to say no. At the very least, not without some bolster of caffeine, or calories, or both. 

So far earlier than usual, he heaved himself off the sofa and wobbled, bandy-legged, to the kitchen. He set the coffee machine going and started pulling items out from the fridge and pantry. It didn’t much matter what he ate, as long as it filled him up before Hickey snuck up on him.

He was in the middle of pouring half-congealed maple syrup into a plastic container of suspicious rice when he felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle. 

Very slowly, he turned around. 

John was standing in the doorway, watching him. 

“Christ,” Sol said, “you scared me.” 

John looked serious pretty much all the time—it was one of his major failings, in Sol’s eyes—but this was probably the most humorless affect Sol had ever seen on him. He was wearing one of his usual dark-colored polo shirts, and the jeans five years out of fashion that seemed to be the only pair he owned, but he gave off the sense of being armored, protected somehow: by heavy chainmail, or perhaps a spotless cassock. 

His fists were curled at his sides as he began to walk towards Sol with terrifying intent. Sol’s black eye throbbed in anticipation, as if it were preparing for the arrival of a sibling. 

Sol tried to head him off, raising his hands in placation. “Listen, I’m—about yesterday, I just wanted to say—” 

But he didn’t get any further than that before John reached him, and wrapped him in what, anatomically speaking, might be construed by an observer to be a hug. In practice, it felt more like a vise, something hydraulic and industrial.

“What the fuck,” Sol said, but it was muffled by the deceptively muscled barrier of John’s shoulder.

John pulled back, a bit, and placed his hands firmly on Sol’s arms. “It wasn’t your fault,” he said. 

“I—what?”

“You were taken advantage of by a devious seducer. I know—I know it wasn’t your fault.” Christ, he was trying so hard. Sol could see it in his eyes, in the set of his jaw. He was putting himself right in Sol’s personal space, as some sort of sick challenge to himself, and paying the price for it: this realization made Sol a bit smug, before it summarily inverted itself and made him feel sad.

“That’s not what happened,” said Sol. He had to try and make him understand. “He didn’t—he didn’t _make_ me do that.” 

“Sol, Sol,” John said, shaking his head pityingly. “You don’t need to lie to me. I know that’s not something you’d do, unless you were forced.” 

“Come on, John. I—” Sol didn’t know if there was a way around it now. He pushed it out from behind gritted teeth. “I wanted it. From you. I did. I—I do. There, I said it. Happy?” 

“I get it,” John said, nodding, clearly not getting it. It was like talking to a very handsome brick wall. “He’s very dangerous, and he’s still got a hold on you, and he’s put these—things into your head. You and me, we’re both the victims here.” 

“I’m not a victim,” Sol insisted. This out of everything was something he couldn’t tolerate. It might’ve been some shitty choices he’d made, but they were _his_ choices, dammit. 

“You are. And I’m sorry for adding to your pain.” John raised a hand, as if to run his fingers down the darkening bruise he’d given Sol. But the touch never came: John drew back quickly, shoved his hand deep into his pocket. “But Silna and Harry are going to figure it out. I went with them yesterday and—well, they know what they’re doing. It’s only a matter of time before he’s gone for good. And after that, things will go back to normal. We never have to speak of it again.” 

Without another word he disappeared, back through the corridor and up the stairs. 

Sol was left with the frustrating urge to run after him, which he didn’t know what to do with, other than turn his attention back to his meal, and wrench open a can of tinned peaches with far more violence than was strictly necessary. 

❧❧❧

He’d considered a funny name for it, like “Hodgson’s Unabridged” or “George of the Bungle,” but in the end George had just decided to keep it simple, and set up his YouTube channel under the name G. H. Hodgson. 

At first it had just been to record supplemental videos for his courses, that he could link in the syllabus and direct students towards in lieu of the kind of dry PDF attachments his fellow lecturers provided. 

But rather quickly and unexpectedly it had started garnering viewers, at first from other departments within his college, then from elsewhere in the university. 

Someone—not him, despite various accusations lobbed—had posted it on the /r/linguistics subreddit, which had driven an immense wave of interested hobbyists: fast forward a few months and a few dozen thousand new subscriptions, and he was making a surprisingly good side income through running ads on regular uploads. A great deal of the comments on his most recent videos dealt with the controversy over his moustache, and whether he looked better with it or without it. He found the intensity of discussion quite flattering, and was considering throwing a wildcard into the mix by growing out his sideburns. 

George reached out to turn on the camera, cleared his throat, and glanced at his notes before beginning. 

“Have you ever wondered why on earth English has such strange, inconsistent spelling? The logic behind a phenomenon which frustrates second-language learners the world over lies in a 300-year process called the Great Vowel Shift…” 

He was just getting to the good part, comparing the orthographies of medieval English to the Continental pronunciations of contemporaneous languages such as Middle French and Early New High German, when he looked over from the camera’s lens into the monitor—and let out a shriek. 

“It’s you!” he gasped.

Indeed, it was. Visible in the monitor was Cornelius Hickey himself, floating behind George like a devil on his shoulder. 

George quickly spun around in his chair to view the phantom with his own eyes. The ghost was dressed quite neatly, in a dark brown jacket worn atop a mustard-yellow waistcoat; he was leaning against an invisible wall or shelf with one leg kicked over the other, displaying a shiny pair of lace-up brown boots, with a slight heel. George wondered immediately where he could get a pair. 

Through Hickey’s translucent form George could see through to his bedroom window, where snow had started to fall from a heavy slate sky in the dying late-afternoon light. 

“What do you want?” George said, recovering his composure. “I’m busy.” 

Hickey floated closer, and then held up a finger to his lips. “Let’s keep our talk low. I have a proposition for you.” 

It felt like being welcomed into a conspiracy, which had always been a dream of George’s ever since he read _Foucault’s Pendulum_ at far too young an age. He scooted his chair across the rug towards Hickey, and leaned forward. 

“Do you know what happened yesterday?” Hickey asked. 

George gave it some thought. The most vivid thing about yesterday had been the night he spent at Natalie’s; they’d gotten Indian takeaway and put on one of her favorite documentaries— though they hadn’t done much in the way of watching it, in the end.

But he didn’t think that’s what the ghost was talking about. George took himself back earlier in time, starting from Wednesday morning. He had held office hours, lectured, got coffee with his advisor. Then he’d come home, watched a bit of telly, then holed up and listened to the new Django Django record while he marked essays, before finally heading out… 

“Think, Mr. Hodgson. Anything… unusual?” 

“Solomon was running around in the garden when I came home,” George said slowly, finally recalling. “Without a coat on.” Hickey nodded, motioning for him to go on. “And then I didn’t see him again, until he came downstairs…and he’d been injured, somehow? He said it was a fall, but…” 

“What do you think really happened?” 

George’s mind immediately began to spit out possibilities like ticker-tape. “He obtained a batch of psychedelic drugs from an untrustworthy supplier and ended up hallucinating he was lost in the Arctic, and tried to jump out the window?” 

A silent moment passed before Hickey let out a laugh of disbelief, scratching at his brow as he shook his head. “That’s a little bit out there, don’t you think? Think closer to home.” 

“...he developed hypothermia, and became disoriented, and thought he was at his old house in Liverpool, and tried to take a bath to warm up, but suffered a harsh knock from the faucet?” 

“No, Mr. Hodgson.” Hickey sighed. “Yesterday I orchestrated a little tete-a-tete between your John and young Solomon. But it didn’t end quite as planned…so I need your help.” 

George was simultaneously repulsed and intrigued by the idea of teaming up with a dead man. On the one hand, John was his friend, and seemed to not like Hickey very much at all, so it wouldn’t be the done thing to be seen collaborating with the ghost in regards to what sounded like a very private matter. But on the other hand, perhaps it was all a big, silly misunderstanding, one George could help bridge, using the interpersonal skills he’d worked so hard to bring up to par. 

After all, now that he was before him, Hickey hardly seemed the craven horror John had made him out to be. He seemed a very bright young man, in fact, if a little ratlike. Maybe the perspective he was bringing to John’s troubles was valuable, in some way. 

“Help to do what?” George asked tentatively. “And…how?” 

“John’s a bit confused, is all,” said Hickey. “If you could allow me to…sit in, so to speak, while you converse with him. He’d listen to you. And I’d give you advice, guide you along.” 

“Sorry, _sit in?”_

“I’d ride along,” said Hickey. “Call it possession, occupation, whatever you like—” 

George gasped, realizing the implications of Hickey’s offer. “I’m not going to let you—get inside me!”

“But I’ll let you take charge,” said Hickey. His voice was a seductive hiss. “It won’t be like it was with Sol. He needed a firm hand. I have a different plan for you. Imagine my power, flowing through you…it’ll feel good, George. It’ll all make sense.” 

He reached out for George’s hand, but George jerked it away before he could feel the icy brush of undead skin. 

“I’m not interested,” said George. “Sorry, but I’ve actually got a girlfriend. Your little come-on won’t work so well on me.” 

The ghost’s eyes crinkled in amusement. “What? You’re joking. You?” 

“Oh, keep it to yourself. I actually have consistently maintained quite a stable and healthy romantic life, unlike the other occupants of this flat. Before Natalie there was this girl I met at a film festival—” 

“Good lord, I don’t care,” said Hickey, waving a hand. “Very well, have it your way.” He began to fade away, the shapes of George’s furniture behind him growing more solid. “I’ll get to him regardless, you know. I just thought it’d be nice for you to be able to contribute.” 

George sat there for a while after the ghost had gone. He steepled his fingers and worked diligently to incorporate the experience he’d just had into the scaffolding of his worldview. He couldn’t believe he’d almost fallen for Hickey’s ploy, but the fellow’s confidence was so appealing! Intoxicating, even. 

He wondered how the ghost hunters were getting on. It suddenly seemed very urgent that they do whatever they were going to do as soon as possible. If there was only some way he could help… 

Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted the blinking red light of his camera. It had been recording this whole time. “Hang on,” he muttered aloud. 

His subsequent investigation of the video file that had just been captured was, at first glance, a disappointment: it merely showed him talking to empty air. The audio file was corrupted completely, loading as only crackling, echoing static. 

After he’d loaded it into his editing program, however, he managed to isolate a few frames that showed flickers of the manifestation; finally, with the help of some enhancement in Photoshop, he had before him a fairly clear image of Cornelius Hickey, mid-recruitment attempt. 

He thought back to that urgent Saturday afternoon, when he and Sol had sat with John at the kitchen table and John had confessed to the tortures he’d been undergoing. He’d described the various terrors of Hickey’s appearance, from the ugly wounds in his chest to the hateful, evil glint in his eyes, to the incongruity of the tall hat he wore. 

But the specter on the screen was bare-headed, and no wounds were visible, ugly or otherwise. 

“Hmm,” George said, and reached for his phone. 

  
  


_GH: Hello. This is George Hodgson. I have a question that might be highly relevant to your investigation of our infestation. Can the type of apparition we’re dealing with shapeshift?_

_HG: What do you mean?_

_GH: Well, let’s say it appeared one way to one person, and a different way to another._

_SE: i havent heard of anything like that no_

_SE: usually just stuck looking how they did when they died…?_

_GH: The implication, then, is that concealment of certain elements of a ghost’s nature could be affected by such a difference?_

_SE: sorry whats this about_

_HG: Have you seen this happen with mr hickey? Has he manifested to you in such a changed state?_

_GH: Let me get back to you. I think I’ve figured something out. Would you mind sending over a precis of your investigation so far?_

_SE: sure 1sec_

_SE: [Attachment: Case0143.docx]_

  
  
  
  
  


_HG: Whats all that about do you think?_

_SE: idk_

_HG: Im fascinated by the possibilities his questions present. Could we be dealing with a case of mistaken identity of some sort or perhaps a different taxonomy of creature merely pretending to be a ghost?_

_SE: idk_

_SE: can you come help me with the pasta i think im doing it wrong i cannot read your moms handwriting this is fucking ridiculous_

_HG: Okay be right down! 🥰_

  
  


❧❧❧

The song playing was one of George’s jangly indie tunes. Maybe John had heard it once at the party, half-obscured under the voices of the revelers, or perhaps emerging muffled from behind George’s door while John ate in the kitchen, but now it was loud and clear and echoing all around, and John’s heart was beating in time. 

It was the heat of summer and the sky was a blazing blue and he strolled down a shaded, leafy avenue, feeling utterly content. On one side of him, arm folded over his, was Cornelius Hickey, alive and well; his red hair glinting like a fresh penny in the sunlight. 

And on the other side was Sol, and he was all dressed up, an old-fashioned outfit with a red waistcoat to match Hickey’s blue one, his beard and hair well-groomed, showing off his sturdy neck, his sweet eyes crinkling in a smile so content it made John’s heart speed up to see it. 

Whichever way John turned there was someone there for him—

—until there wasn’t, suddenly, and the sun had gone too, and the sky above him was dark and gray and freezing rain was pelting down, and he was alone— 

John desperately reached out, scrabbling at the side of the bed, seeking something, someone to hold, cold or hot, he didn’t care, who or what didn’t matter, damn the consequences—

His hand met something cold and solid, and he jerked into full consciousness with a choked gasp. 

Hickey was lying beside him, his luminescent body half-submerged in the sheets, as if he were floating on the surface of a calm lake. He wasn’t wearing any clothes at all. Around the wounds on his chest, his skin, clear and soft, let off a glow that illuminated the bedspread, and John’s hand where it had landed on his outstretched arm. 

“You thought I wouldn’t come?” he said. “I care about you, John.” 

“You’ve got a funny way of showing it.”

“Do I, though?” Hickey asked. “ _You’ve_ just got a funny way of taking it. Because you don’t know what it’s like, do you? To be wanted.” 

Hickey reached forward and, just as he’d done with Sol’s hand, smoothed back John’s fringe from his forehead, looking at John with a calm, steady desire. 

“Do you imagine I did this for every lost soul who ever slept in this bed? Every desperate loner, every solitary penitent?”

“I—I don’t know,” John stuttered. 

“No. You’re special, John. There’s been nobody like you. Not in years. Decades. Centuries.” 

John closed his eyes, and let a shudder have the run of his body. He was fast approaching a boundary he knew there would be no way back from. 

❧❧❧

“George, this is amazing!” Harry peered through his glasses at George’s laptop screen. “May I?” 

“Of course,” George said, and let Harry lean over, and browse through the dozens of tabs of research he had collated over the last few hours. “It’s all there. Baptismal record, census appearances, court transcripts. Plus articles, broadsheets, even a few penny-bloods based on the incident.” 

“Mm. Good work,” said Silna, which wasn’t exactly high praise but seemed absolutely immense coming from her. 

George sat back in his expensive leather office chair, his hands behind his head in the universal pose of self-satisfaction. “Oh, it was nothing,” he said, though his whole body was thrumming with approval. These guys were _cool._ They were so damn cool George couldn’t even believe they were in his _house,_ let alone his _room._ He harbored a very real hope that Harry would ask him about any volume in the stack of books he’d carefully arranged right next to his computer, and they could get into the weeds in a conversation regarding the presence of the spectral in the Arthurian mythos. 

But Harry was laser-focused on the research George had laid out, which all in all was a good thing. Hopefully, he could make use of it in some way. 

Because above all, George’s priority was to make sure John was safe. He’d had, for some days now, the horrible, guilty sense that somehow he’d made all of this happen—perhaps if he’d never brought up the whole ghost thing, never made John aware of it, it would never have spiraled into such a situation. 

Of course such an idea was fanciful—the ghost had been here for nearly two centuries, and surely would have found a way to wreak havoc regardless of George’s participation—but still, George felt the need to make it up to John. Even though they’d been friends for ten years, and had been through some truly ridiculous times together, he still harbored a permanent fear that he might be tossed aside for the smallest of slights at any time. 

Once he’d realized the possibility that Hickey had not been murdered, as he’d claimed to be, and in fact had been _posing_ as a murdered man as a kind of aesthetic appropriation, it had been a matter of mere seconds before his mind had made a questionable leap that turned out to be right on the money: in the existing records of Cornelius Hickey’s death was the name of the man who murdered _him,_ and perhaps _that_ was the true identity of the ghost that haunted the house.

“What a way to go,” said Harry, squinting at a scanned broadsheet containing some of the more gruesome details.

“And…that’s _really_ him?” Silna asked. “Really. You’re _sure?”_

George nodded. “I double-checked it against the census records. He was recorded as living right here, in this house, which the real Cornelius Hickey never was. And—see that engraving, there? I compared it to the image I captured. It’s definitely him.” 

“But, I mean, _that_ name, specifically?” 

“Well, it’s not like it’s an uncommon name,” George said. “If you think about it, at least a few people must have been called it, at some point.” 

“Bloody hell,” said Silna. “What are the chances.” 

❧❧❧

“John, what do you want?” 

What a question. John wanted to go back to sleep, dream himself back in that green wood, held for the whole world to see. 

He wanted to lie down in Solomon Tozer’s lap, surround himself with plush warmth and the sweet, welcoming scent of him. 

He wanted to lick a sweet stripe up the length of a dead man’s cock and revel in the cool velvety feel of it before taking it in full into his mouth.

Most importantly he wanted to not have to try anymore. And he had, he _had_ been trying; because somehow after so long of it being simple, second-nature, to deny and push away, it was like he’d suddenly forgotten how. 

And the world still went on around him. Ned had been going through something terrible at work this week, judging by the glimpses of the ragged countenance John had seen mostly at a distance. And George had started seeing someone, possibly, which was an event John normally would’ve reveled in and celebrated along with his friend. 

But John hadn’t been able to be there for either of them. Or for himself, for that matter: work had gone undone, the gym had gone unattended. His room, usually so neat as to receive regular fond mockery, had descended into disorderly chaos: clothes everywhere, dirty plates and bowls piled up on his desk. 

Every single ounce of his energy had been redistributed, dedicated to resisting the pull of attraction, letting everything fall by the wayside as he held on to the person he thought he was, the man he thought he had to be. 

What if it didn’t have to be this hard? 

Hickey was still waiting for his answer. He was giving him time, but John didn’t need a minute more. 

“Please,” he said. “Yes. I want it.” 

“My dear Jack. You only ever had to ask.”

❧❧❧

Silna suddenly flung a hand out, landing it on Harry’s chest protectively as if she’d just slammed on the brakes of a car. “He’s here,” she breathed. “Right now. I can feel him. Upstairs, I think—Harry, now could be our chance!” 

“Chance for what?” George said. 

Harry immediately started rummaging in his backpack. “We can eliminate him,” he said, “now that we’ve got his true name, and cause of death, we can banish him from this plane.” 

He started laying what looked like metallic runestones on the carpet, but Silna clucked her tongue at him, shook her head.

“What?” he said. 

“Oh, come on! We don’t need all that—not when he’s fully manifested like this—just get the machine, use the settings from the cemetery—!” 

They began to bicker about best practices, while George looked on in bewilderment. 

“What’s all this about?” Sol was in the doorway; he must have heard the commotion from the front room. 

“I did some independent research,” George explained, “and was able to find out how the ghost died, and his real name, so Harry and Silna think they can get rid of him right now.” 

“Oh. Fuck,” said Sol. His eyes darted upwards towards where John’s room lay, directly above George’s, and then drummed his fingers nervously on his upper thigh. He seemed to be coming to some sort of decision. 

“D’you need any help?” he asked.

❧❧❧

“Oh, oh— Christ—!” 

“Shh, shh now,” Hickey murmured. His hand slid up John’s bare chest, pressing him down into the mattress, stopping him from arching up. He’d worked a slim finger on the other hand into John, slicked up through some ghostly means John didn’t even want to think about, cold but nearly not as cold as he’d expected. 

All the expertise Hickey had shown with his own self-manipulation was in full evidence now; though none of the demonstrations quite matched up to the way it felt when in direct application to John’s most intimate areas. 

John’s cock, red and urgent, leaked impatiently, leaving a glistening smear against his stomach where it lay, and Hickey brushed a gentle palm against it, teasing and playful. 

“Look at you,” Hickey cooed as John shuddered beneath him, “like an angel, you are, let me take you up, let me show you how it’ll feel, in Heaven where you belong...” 

He could come just like this, from the praise falling like the snow and from the slick drag of Hickey’s fingers, two now, reaching in, stretching him open. 

But Hickey had other plans, and John knew it. He meant to have him fully, take him as deeply as he’d promised, all those nights whispering into John's ear. 

❧❧❧

“Getting out the Latin now?” Sol said, leaning back against George’s desk, crossing his arms and giving the ghost hunters a skeptical once-over. 

Harry shook his head. “We have a holistic, secular approach,” he said, “informed by Silna’s psychic instincts and independent study into—” 

“Sure, yeah, alright,” said Sol, cutting Harry off with a scoff. “Got it.” 

Silna went and sat, without asking, on the edge of George’s bed; she extended her hands in front of her, moving slowly, as if she were casting a spell, or feeling out the boundaries of some unseen landscape. Harry shuffled across the rug to crouch at her feet, his box bleeping in his hands as he adjusted settings, turned knobs and dials and extended various antennae with urgency.

“What’s going on?” Now it was Ned, poking his head in. He was still in his coat and scarf, his hair and beard flecked with melting snowflakes; he must have just come in from work. 

“Oi, get in here,” Sol said. “Apparently, we’re about to kill a ghost.” 

❧❧❧

Gibson had been right. Of course, John had known that weeks ago, but now that he had firsthand experience he had no choice but to admit it: Hickey was extremely good at this. 

“Up,” said Hickey, beckoning John with the very fingers that had recently been pressing up inside John, against the spot that had made him gasp and squirm and sweat. “On your knees, and turn around.” 

“Can’t we—go like this?” said John tentatively, motioning at himself, laid out supine on the sheets. He didn’t want to be able to pretend anything other than what was actually happening was happening, was the thing. 

Hickey’s smile glowed in the dark. “Can we, now,” he said. “For you, anything.” 

❧❧❧

George held his breath. The temperature in the room had dropped what felt like ten degrees as soon as Silna had begun to speak. 

“From above to below, from the snow to the sun, from the ice to the coal. Scarred and whole, locked and free, let your spirit rest, let your soul be unbound. This is not a wish nor a fancy. Not a dream nor an idle request. This is a mandate! You must return to dust, spirit, and haunt this house no longer!” 

❧❧❧

A part of his mind was unanchored, had drifted loose; was casting about in the swirling snow outside, beating hopelessly at the window to be let back in. Howling threats of damnation and doom were muffled, unable to break through to where the rest of John was centered, anchored, locked in to where Hickey had him, moving exactly the way John needed him to, not missing a single beat. 

The ghost looked confident. Happy. Delighted, even: he looked like John was making him feel good, more than good. The glow that enveloped his form had turned from sickly green to yellow, peach, red, as if the sun itself was rising above John.

“Oh, you are magical,” said Hickey, catching one of John’s wrists, pressing a thumb to his palm, the weight there adding something wonderful to the tightening pleasure rising quickly within him. 

John couldn’t hold back. His cock had hardly been touched but Hickey’s next thrust sent him tumbling over the edge. He let out a desperate whine which Hickey leaned down to kiss right out of him, as he fucked him through his orgasm, strong hands bearing him down. 

❧❧❧

“I free you from this plane,” Silna said, almost singing now, her voice rising and falling along with the melody of the otherworldly wind that was now howling round the room. George was holding tightly onto Ned, who at some point had grabbed Sol’s hand. “I send you away from our world, and on to the next, forever!” 

She took a deep breath. 

“And I name you: _Edward Cullen!”_

❧❧❧

Hickey opened his mouth, as if to let out a triumphant cry, or perhaps to say John’s name as he came, because John felt him begin to spill inside him now, like nothing he’d ever felt before. 

But then his expression changed—something had gone wrong, was going very very wrong—

Above him John saw Hickey’s body flicker, like a film-reel projection gone wrong—the wounds on his chest disappearing, revealing smooth skin beneath—a great dark bruise blooming around his neck—blood vessels around his eyes, bursting into redness—

And then, like a swollen bubble punctured by an invisible needle, Hickey’s form solidified, tensed, and then simply—

_—exploded._

With a horrible, wet noise, gobbets of ectoplasm were flung everywhere, drenching John where he lay. Sticky and jellylike and glowing slightly in wobbly chunks, it covered every surface, including the window and the ceiling and John’s laptop, sitting open on his messy desk. 

There was the sound of shouts—of feet, stampeding up the stairs—and then with a slam, John’s bedroom door threw itself open. 

“Oh, Christ,” someone said. 

Five familiar faces, all wearing looks of deep concern, were crowded in the threshold.

John became aware, dimly, that he was lying naked atop his sheets, covered in a mix of his own come, Hickey’s come, and copious amounts of the luminescent ooze that was all that remained of the ghost that had, until quite recently, been fucking him passionately. 

“Hi, guys,” he said weakly. 

Without a pause, Harry bounded into the room and began investigating, scooping up some of the slime into a plastic container he produced from his pocket as a matter of course. 

Ned and George stepped gingerly inside, surveying the scene with deep discomfort. Silna leaned against the wall near the door, closed her eyes, and then opened them again after a moment. “Yeah, he’s gone,” she said, the hint of an accomplished smile flickering across her features. 

Sol was the last one in, and the only one who met John’s eyes. 

“Out,” he said commandingly. Nobody seemed to take notice. He planted his feet and roared, “EVERYONE OUT OF HERE, RIGHT NOW!” 

They all went. Sol stayed. 

❧❧❧

The bathroom had escaped the majority of the ectoplasmic drenching, so Sol grabbed a towel and brought it over to John’s bed. John took it silently, and wiped his face and chest clean, before laying it across his naked lap, hiding from view his prick, handsome even in its dormancy.

“Hey,” Sol said. “Do you want to talk about it?” 

John stared down at the gunk that still coated his bedspread, and then back up to Sol with an expression that indicated his answer as clearly as any spoken _no._

“Alright, you don’t have to. Hey, let me tell you about what happened downstairs…” 

Sol described, as best he could remember, the summary of the research George had gathered: how the ghost, when he'd been alive, had murdered a man named William Gibson in cold blood, and been caught; his connection to a series of past killings uncovered by Scotland Yard, including that of a man called Cornelius Hickey; how he’d been tried, convicted, and finally hanged in front of Newgate Prison, in front of a crowd of thousands. 

(Hickey's real name didn't get a reaction out of John at all, which Sol was disappointed by, but in retrospect should have expected. He'd have to explain it later.) 

“So…he was _pretending_ to have been murdered?” John asked, when Sol had finished. His voice was slightly stronger, and the high flush on his cheeks had mostly receded. “What on earth for?” 

Sol shrugged. “Beats me. Maybe he liked the aesthetic. Or maybe he thought you’d go in for that kind of thing. Taking pity on a lost soul, and all. Didn’t realize how much of an uncharitable prick you are, clearly.” It was meant as a bit of friendly teasing, but after it had left his mouth Sol realized a jab like that might’ve gone too far, with John in such a state. 

But John smiled ruefully, and sighed. “I am a bit, yeah.” 

“Or maybe,” said Sol slowly now, “he just didn’t want to be who he’d been anymore. Now, I’m not saying I’ll kill a man and take his name, but I understand the impulse. Wanting to start over. Wanting to leave it behind, everything you’ve done…or not done, you know?” 

Sol had laid a hand quietly atop of John’s, feeling the bony knuckles, the calluses from his days at the climbing gym. 

“What are you doing?” John said, very quietly. 

Sol didn’t know how to answer that, other than to lean in and kiss John. It was nothing special—just a gentle press, lasting only a few seconds before drawing back. 

He was glad John had thrown him off the other day, before Hickey could move to lay Sol’s lips on John’s. It wasn’t something he’d ever want to share. 

“I told you,” Sol said. “It wasn’t him. Well, it was, but it was me, too.” 

“But…why?” 

Sol had never seen John’s green eyes so big, so glassy.

“Look, if you start picking at it, it’ll fall apart,” said Sol gruffly. “So I suggest you just shut up for now, how’s that?” 

John nodded tightly, some of his habitual seriousness returning, which Sol surprisingly found a comfort. Maybe it did suit him. Maybe Sol didn’t need him all loosened up and cheerful; maybe he didn’t want him that way at all, if it didn’t come natural. He wanted him however he was meant to be. 

“Does this mean we can…?” John asked. 

Sol shrugged. “Yeah. Maybe.” 

There would be a lot to do. For one, Sol would definitely need to move out, first and foremost, if they were to carry on like this. He was thinking somewhere south of the river, perhaps. He could get a job on a construction site somewhere, or at a garage. 

He’d need to find a therapist, most likely. He’d need to find _John_ a therapist. Maybe the same one, for convenience. He’d need to finally tell Ned about the two of them, and hope the man could pull his head out of his own business long enough to either give his stamp of approval or, just as likely, tell him he was being stupid, John Irving wasn’t the kind of guy you just started something up with like this, it definitely wouldn’t end well, et cetera. 

Not that Sol would pay him much heed, if he said something like that. The way John was looking at him right now was all the proof he needed. Proof that this could be worth putting in the work for.

“What do we do about all this?” John said, ever practical, gesturing at the mess Hickey had left. “It might start to smell.” It was pretty gruesome, but Sol couldn’t help seeing it as a beautiful sight: the ghost was gone, really and truly. While he was grateful for the groundwork Hickey had laid, he was also quite glad he’d not be coming around again anytime soon. 

“We’ll get to it,” said Sol. “We’ve got time, yeah?” 

He guided John up from the bed and into the shower, then stood in the doorway and listened as the water bore the last of the ghost-stuff down off of John’s skin, leaving him clean.

“Everything alright up there?” came a shout from downstairs. Ned, bless his heart.

“We’re fine!” hollered Sol, and then, quieter, just to himself as he admired the shape of John’s body through the cheap translucent shower curtain, “We’re doing just fine.” 

  
  
  
  
  
  


**THE END**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 👻 If you're interested in a para-canonical post-credits scene, in the style of Hollywood superhero blockbusters, you can find it [here.](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vRN_2-7A-0RDww6QxykKqhvbkDpIPzuVU-glXd4WUtcJTvxD7hONT-gjMxMmydXAcf-RBb38XPl-bck/pub)
> 
> 👻 George’s YouTube channel was directly inspired by [Simon Roper,](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChnRk6mxWsSOGElm8phdSxw) who is extremely cool, and has extremely cool sideburns. 
> 
> 👻 [Here's](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6WEpXBA5s0sbQ0elOuLEDW?si=E0PpZoHpSn6s5ZyeBd9KoA) my silly little playlist for the whole story! (The "Bustin'" on there is the Neil Cicierega version, idk how to get the name to show up since it's a local file, but you can listen to it [here,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tdyU_gW6WE) it's important)

**Author's Note:**

> come hang on [tumblr](http://areyougonnabe.tumblr.com) and [twitter!](http://twitter.com/areyougonnabe)


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